By AJ McDougall
nj.com
TRENTON, N.J. — The New Jersey Department of Corrections tracks violence against its own staff the way other agencies track potholes or snow days: with annual targets. Last fiscal year’s benchmark was blunt — fewer than 382 assaults on employees would be considered satisfactory.
By year’s end, the number had more than doubled that mark, reaching 838 recorded incidents. More than 60% of cases involved “splashing,” in which bodily fluids are flung at staff.
The state quietly revised its goal for the current fiscal year.
Now, no more than 806 assaults will be tolerated.
Until it gets worse.
Assaults on correctional officers in New Jersey’s state prisons are not an aberration, but part of a trend both officials and officers attribute to a dangerous combination of overcrowding, chronic turnover and an increasingly strained workforce.
The staffing crisis in particular has degraded conditions for officers and incarcerated people alike.
“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen in 35 years,” said Andy Potter, executive director of One Voice United, a national advocacy group for corrections officers.
Assaults on staff, on the rise since 2022, reflect conditions inside New Jersey’s nine state prisons that both lawmakers and department leaders now characterize as the most serious staffing crisis in decades. More than 13% of “custody staff” positions — corrections officers and their supervisors — are unfilled, Corrections Commissioner Victoria L. Kuhn told legislators last spring.
At the time, she added, the department was also losing about 18 officers a month to resignations or retirement.
New Jersey’s experience is not unique. Staffing problems in corrections have been documented in all 50 states in recent years. The number of corrections officers nationwide fell by about 20% between 2017 and 2022, according to data from the Safer Prisons, Safer Communities campaign. Federal labor projections indicate that the trend is likely to persist in coming years.
Kuhn said the pandemic accelerated resignations and retirements at a time when recruitment had already become more difficult. Shrinking benefits and mediocre pay compared with other law enforcement jobs has also made it harder to attract new officers, she said.
“Nobody wants to be a corrections officer anymore,” Terry Schuster, New Jersey’s corrections ombudsperson, testified at a legislative hearing earlier this month. “Recruiting is really hard for all law enforcement agencies right now, and the Department of Corrections is no different.”
Employees and advocates say the effects are visible throughout the system: longer shifts, programs trimmed back or scrapped entirely, fewer privileges for incarcerated people and a heightened sense of volatility on housing units. Fewer officers, they say, can mean fewer opportunities to de-escalate, and more circumstances in which routine interactions turn confrontational.
Lawmakers have warned of what they called a “vicious cycle,” where vacancies feed burnout and low morale, which in turn spur further departures.
“It’s a humanitarian crisis and a security crisis and it’s happening, and it’s going to get worse,” Schuster said at this month’s hearing.
It has also carried a significant cost for New Jersey taxpayers. Mandatory overtime used to cover vacancies — paid at time-and-a-half — totaled an estimated $154.5 million in 2025. A further $162.5 million is budgeted for this year. (By comparison, in 2019, the Department of Corrections reported just $35.8 million in overtime expenditures.)
Several former officers described leaving the department after repeated incidents in which they felt unsafe or unsupported.
Michael, a 32-year-old former special investigator at Northern State Prison, said he decided to resign after two separate incidents in which he was splashed with a cocktail of urine and feces while documenting forced removals from cells, known as “cell extractions.”
Michael worked in the state prison system from 2018 to early 2025, and had been growing more and more unhappy with the job. The three-hour round-trip commute from Ocean County to Newark. The heavy backlog of cases that threatened to overwhelm him and his colleagues. The 16-hour mandatory double shifts, sometimes several a week, to make up for a lack of staff.
But the department’s lackluster response to the twin assaults, which happened in the same week last February, proved to be the final straw.
“I just don’t think anybody cared,” said Michael, who asked to use a pseudonym because he still works in New Jersey law enforcement.
It’s impossible to fully grasp the reality of walking through the gates of a state prison day after day, said Anthony Errol Davis , a corrections sergeant who retired in 2014.
“It’s not normal to see guys jumping and beating on another guy and not letting up. It’s not normal to go take a count, and there’s a guy in his bed, dead,” added Davis, who served at Mid-State Prison in Fort Dix for 16 years before transferring to the now-defunct Riverfront State Prison, in Camden, and then Garden State Youth Correctional Facility , in Chesterfield.
“I’ve seen guys assaulted, left a bloody mess,” he said. “That’s not normal.”
NJ Advance Media requested updated staffing numbers in April 2024 from the Department of Corrections under the Open Public Records Act.
As of January 2026, it had not complied.
A spokesperson for the department also did not provide a response to detailed questions sent earlier this month about this story’s findings.
Many officers once viewed the job through the long lens of retirement. They are required to work 25 years to qualify for a full pension, a benefit that was long seen as compensation for difficult and sometimes dangerous work.
“Every day, you have a decent chance of being stabbed, kicked, punched, elbowed, spit on, and called names,” Potter said.
But the calculus has shifted, according to six current and former correctional officers who spoke with NJ Advance Media . With chronic understaffing leading to heightened safety concerns, the promise of a pension no longer feels sufficient to justify staying.
“There’s no possibility that you could work that many hours in those kinds of conditions and not have it affect you, mentally and physically,” Potter said. “You will not be the same person. It desensitizes you. It dehumanizes you. And pretty soon, you don’t see humanity the same.”
‘Damage was already done’
When Kevin Sheppard started working as a New Jersey corrections officer in the early 1980s, it was the best game in town.
It was also the only game in town, particularly in a place like South Jersey. The oyster industry had gone belly-up, and the sand mines had shut down. Sheppard’s father and older brother were both in corrections, so he figured he’d join the family business.
The pay was steady, but the benefits were the real draw. After 20 years, officers could retire with a generous pension. The work could be hazardous, but it was considered secure, with relatively little overtime required, though plenty was available for those who wanted it. Sheppard said he worked double shifts only occasionally.
He retired in 2008 to full benefits.
“It’s a job that people either absolutely love or absolutely hate,” he said. “Me personally, I enjoyed every minute of my career.”
But, he added, he knows “it’s not as lucrative a job as it was when I retired.”
That change accelerated after 2011, when pension reforms signed by then-Gov. Chris Christie increased employee contributions, introduced health-insurance premiums, froze cost-of-living adjustments and lengthened the years of service required for full benefits. Union leaders say wages then stagnated for years as a new contract was hashed out.
The state police union, NJ PBA Local 105, which represents corrections officers, won a significant salary increase in 2024. Even so, union officials like William Sullivan, its president, say it has not fully offset the earlier cuts or the strain of working in understaffed facilities.
Nor was it enough to eclipse the heightened scrutiny of law enforcement officers in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police in 2020 or prison scandals like at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Clinton, in which Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration was blasted by federal officials for “severe and prevalent” sexual assault throughout the prison by guards and staff.
“The damage was already done,” Sullivan said. “The job was no longer appealing whatsoever.”
The Department of Corrections says about 6,600 employees are needed to operate the state’s prisons safely, including 4,872 custody staff — officers and their supervisors. That estimate is well below levels from previous decades, reflecting a sharply reduced prison population, which has fallen from more than 31,000 people in 1999 to fewer than 13,000 at the start of 2025, as well as the closure of four state prisons since 2020.
Last February, 4,227 custody positions were filled, leaving roughly 645 vacancies, according to figures provided to lawmakers by the Department of Corrections . At the Jan. 5 hearing, Schuster said that 400 positions remained unfilled.
Legislators only recently began to reckon with the problem. The State Legislature unanimously approved a bill in 2024 increasing penalties for assaults on law enforcement officers, but broader legislation addressing staffing has not advanced.
For newer officers, the job can feel markedly different from Sheppard’s era. Michael, who joined the department after training at its Jersey Shore academy, said he expected difficult conditions but was surprised by the contrast between facilities. His first posting, at Mid-State Correctional Facility, which focuses on addiction treatment, was comparatively calm, he said.
His transfer to Northern State Prison — a facility more than three times larger — coincided with a promotion to special investigator in 2023, and brought less daily contact with the general population. Even so, he said the environment, particularly inside its Restorative Housing Unit, felt like “a totally different world.”
Restorative Housing Units typically hold inmates being disciplined for infractions such as “assaultive behavior, threats, drug possession, or refusing orders,” according to the correction ombudsperson’s office. Northern State Prison houses more than half of the approximately 700 RHU beds in New Jersey , with most of the rest split across Edna Mahan, Trenton’s New Jersey State Prison and Bridgeton’s South Woods State Prison.
In Northern State’s unit, Michael said he observed “K2 (synthetic marijuana) smoke everywhere” and “water leaking from the toilets.” The unit flooded frequently, forming small rivers that ran down the stairs, he remembered.
“There’s roaches. There’s rats. There’s the smell of feces, blood and semen,” said Rebecca Uwakwe, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey .
Then there is the noise. Many of the inmates come into the unit struggling with mental health issues, which are only exacerbated by their environment, according to Uwakwe.
“People talk about hearing constant screams,” she said. “It’s people essentially falling apart, having mental health episodes, breaking down, screaming, losing their minds.”
There’s also the ubiquitous blaring of an alarm that warns of medical emergencies, fights, fires and splashing incidents. Michael estimated such “security codes” would ring out three to five times a shift at Northern State, intensifying an “extremely chaotic” environment.
“You can’t even focus because there’s so much going on,” he said.
Advocates and former officers say conditions in these units often reflect, and even exemplify, the broader staffing strain. Lockdowns have been used frequently when there are not enough officers to run normal operations, according to an October 2024 report by the ombudsperson’s office.
The report, based on nine months of inspections by Schuster and his team, found “really, really tough staffing problems,” Schuster said. “Between one-third of the time and one-half of the time, they were just locking the whole facility down because there weren’t enough staff to run the place.”
In lockdown, some inmates were “kept in their cells for the full day with minimal services,” the report found, unable to move around common areas and socialize, use the prison’s phones or go outside in the yard for fresh air.
Education and vocational programs, recreational activities and religious services were also canceled.
“So they’re in a cell that’s probably the size of a parking lot space, where they can extend their arms and touch the walls,” Uwakwe said. “All day.”
This is not a new problem. Schuster’s office found in 2023 that “upwards of 96%” of surveyed RHU inmates in Northern State, New Jersey State and South Woods reported being allowed out of their cells for two hours or less each day.
New Jersey Prison Justice Watch, an advocacy organization, has pointed out this violates the state’s Isolated Confinement Restriction Act, a 2019 law meant to keep inmates from spending more than 20 hours a day in their cells.
The Department of Corrections has disputed characterizations that its practices constitute solitary confinement under state law.
‘The walking dead’
The image has stayed with Elizabeth Cascarelli for more than two decades. She remembers blood and grape soda seeping out from underneath a cell door, a chilling visual that, for her, captured the level of everyday distress inside the unit she was tasked with guarding.
Cascarelli served as a correctional officer at the Edna Mahan until her retirement four years ago. She said the incident involved a woman in a significant mental health crisis who was cutting herself inside her cell. Cascarelli knew her; their interactions had sometimes been strained, but she said it was also clear the woman needed more treatment than she was receiving.
“She aggravated me at times, but my heart went out to her,” Cascarelli said.
Following procedure, Cascarelli and a supervisor waited for a cell extraction order, without which they couldn’t open the door. Without authorization to intervene, they could only plead with the woman on the other side to stop cutting. She survived, but the incident never left Cascarelli.
“There’s nothing worse than seeing that,” she said.
Corrections officers suffer depression, PTSD or both at rates significantly higher than the national average, according to a 2013 study of nearly 3,600 officers. In 2009, the New Jersey Police Suicide Task Force found the suicide rate for corrections officers was 34.8 per 100,000, more than double that of police officers at 15.1 per 100,000 — itself a rate already well above civilian numbers.
At least two correctional sergeants reached out to the New Jersey Law Enforcement Supervisors Association over the summer seeking help for alcohol abuse they attributed in part to workplace stress, according to Andre Godbolt , the president of the New Jersey Law Enforcement Supervisors Association, a labor union.
“It takes a toll on you and a toll on your family,” he said.
The mental harm is compounded by the effects of mandatory overtime, stretching shifts late into the night and erasing predictable time off. The cycle erodes sleep, family life and the ability to decompress from volatile environments, according to advocates and experts.
At a corrections recruitment event in Newark last summer, an officer told the crowd that staff might “get mandatoried up to two days a week, depending on the time of year.” But several former officers told NJ Advance Media that they had worked as many as three or four 16-hour shifts in a week, or knew colleagues who had.
Before Thomas Huber retired as a correctional lieutenant from Edna Mahan last July, it wasn’t uncommon for him to be “hit for doubles four times a week in a five-day work week,” he said. Officers who refused faced written reprimands, suspensions of up to 15 days or termination.
“It was like you were the walking dead, doing 16-hour shifts and 16-hour shifts and 16-hour shifts,” he said.
In 2023, the Department of Corrections characterized being tapped for mandatory overtime “several” times each week as an “unfortunate reality” of the job, at least for now.
In an attempt to replenish its ranks, New Jersey has mounted an aggressive recruiting campaign, creating a full-time unit that pitches a career in corrections at school fairs and sporting events.
At the Newark event, two officers walked a few dozen attendees through the application — the physical test, a background check — while one held up a QR code that linked straight to the 30-page form.
“It’s really quick,” she assured the room.
Inside prisons, leaders are trying to keep the staff they already have. At Garden State Correctional Facility last June, administrators laid out coffee and pastries beneath a cheerful chalkboard pun: “Words cannot EXPRESSO how much you BEAN to us!!”
There are signs of progress. The training academy has recently produced some of its largest classes since before the pandemic, including more than 120 graduates each in early and late 2025, according to posts on the department’s social media pages.
That still remains below pre-2020 levels, when annual totals regularly topped 300, but is a sharp rebound from the nadir of 2021, when departures peaked at about 50 officers a month. Attrition has also since slowed to what Kuhn described last April as the lowest rate on record.
“They’ve done a really good job of both recruitment and retention,” Schuster acknowledged at the hearing, “but we’re barely keeping up and there’s a lot of people who are about to leave.”
An “enormous number” of staff departures may be in the state prison system’s near future, he explained. Roughly 250 officers are already eligible to retire with full pensions, and another 200 will reach eligibility this year. An additional 650 could leave under a separate negotiated pension after 20 years of service.
“Come 2027, we might be in a real difficult place,” Sullivan said.
The union president, himself a 20-year veteran of the department, says he’ll still be working at that point. He’s committed to sticking it out, but he’s already warned his younger sister not to follow in his footsteps.
“She keeps telling me she wants a job, and I keep telling her not to,” he said. “It’s not something I’d want a family member to do for the next 30 years.”
What do you think finally pushes good corrections officers to leave — and what, if anything, would make them stay?
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