Corrections agencies in 2025 faced a convergence of long-standing and emerging challenges. Staffing shortages remain acute, inmate mental health needs continue to strain facilities, and concerns around officer safety, burnout and retention are growing more urgent. At the same time, leaders are being asked to do more with fewer resources while navigating heightened public scrutiny and operational complexity.
In this roundtable, corrections experts discuss how agencies are responding to these pressures, sharing practical strategies and hard-earned lessons that are shaping the future of the profession.
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Corrections salaries still not keeping up with the cost of living
I recently spoke at a corrections conference in upstate Texas, where I asked attendees to write on the back of an index card what they hate about their profession. I pulled about six cards in a row that read: “I hate the pay,” “the pay,” “my salary,” “my living wages,” and similar responses. It seems that every year, the topic of conversation does not change — salaries in corrections remain a major concern.
At every conference, the main topic is still the same: everyone is struggling to cover everyday expenses. Everything has gone up in price, from drive-through meals to housing. The struggle continues.
For the past 20 years, I have worked in the field of community corrections, and for those same 20 years, I have held a part-time job. It saddens me to say this, but I am not alone. Many of my coworkers are now seeking part-time work to keep up with rising property taxes and the increasing cost of college tuition.
For professionals who were required to attend a university and obtain a four-year degree just to apply for a position in community corrections, this is a troubling reality. Even with the most recent cost-of-living increases provided by the state of Texas, many officers across the state saw little to no meaningful increase in their pay.
I have asked, and will continue to ask, for research to help justify a significant pay adjustment for those who work in corrections, so they can keep pace with the rising cost of everyday services.
— Leandro “Leo” Perez, Jr. is a supervisor for the Hidalgo County (Texas) Community Supervision and Corrections Department.
Closing the wellness gap
One of the most urgent challenges corrections faced in 2025 was the widening gap between widespread recognition of the need for staff wellness and the resources allocated to support it. Leaders across the country increasingly acknowledged that correctional staff — particularly custody staff — are experiencing extreme levels of anxiety, depression, PTSD, sleep disruption, substance misuse and suicide risk. These conditions are almost certainly contributing to the profession’s epidemic-level turnover.
Yet many wellness efforts remained under-resourced, short-lived, and shaped by “low-hanging fruit” or well-intentioned initiatives rather than evidence of effectiveness. Wellness coordinators — when designated — were asked to address systemic challenges without adequate funding, training, authority, data, or personnel. Agencies understandably hoped these efforts might help counter years of stress, trauma, understaffing and organizational strain through goodwill, limited programming and occasional “feel-good” events. Given these constraints, results were often modest at best, reflecting limitations in scale, design and sustained investment rather than any question about the relevance of wellness to job performance. When outcomes fell short, some leaders misattributed this to the concept of wellness itself, further complicating efforts to build long-term support.
Other agencies relied on grants that often failed to materialize or attempted to fund wellness temporarily by diverting resources from other essential programs. This reinforced the misconception that wellness is optional while increasing strain on both staff and incarcerated people. Meanwhile, agencies continued spending enormous sums on overtime to compensate for staffing shortages rather than investing upstream in wellness to prevent the crisis.
Wellness is not optional in a profession defined by chronic high stress and extreme mental and physical health risks. Healthy, rested and supported staff are the foundation of safe, humane and effective correctional operations. Without them, culture deteriorates, programs falter and harm escalates for everyone inside the system.
Importantly, evidence now demonstrates that wellness done right works. A recent pilot study produced strikingly positive outcomes when staff wellness was treated as a true operational priority.
What must change in 2026
First, staff wellness must be formally recognized as mission-critical and supported by a protected, recurring budget line. It can no longer be treated as an afterthought or low-cost add-on. Cutting corners ultimately costs lives.
Second, wellness must be integrated into daily operations through policy and statute, including fatigue mitigation and sleep policies, overtime limits, adequate academy hours, ongoing training, access to mental health services and trauma-informed supervision. Data-driven frameworks and evidence-informed standards strengthen quality and sustainability.
Finally, culture change must be intentional and systematic. Leaders must model emotionally intelligent, supportive leadership; reduce stigma around seeking help; embed culture-strengthening practices into policy, planning, and leadership development; strengthen peer support; and maintain meaningful connection to frontline work.
In 2026, wellness cannot remain symbolic. Corrections cannot function effectively or ethically without healthy staff. Fully funded, systemwide staff wellbeing is the prerequisite for safer facilities, humane conditions and lasting reform.
— Caterina Spinaris, PhD, LPC, is the founding director of Desert Waters Correctional Outreach (DWCO), and a Licensed Professional Counselor in the State of Colorado. Stephanie Rawlings, MSc, works at Desert Waters Correctional Outreach (DWCO).
Hiring, training and supporting the next generation of COs
Corrections in 2025 was, and continues to be, marked by the need to manage multiple challenges. Officer safety is always a concern and a priority, and understaffed facilities only increase the danger.
When discussing today’s correctional officers, we must consider age at hiring, job-related stress and training. In 2023, Corrections1 readers responded to a survey asking what the minimum hiring age for correctional officers should be. Only 17% selected age 18, while a clear majority (59%) said 21 years old, and 21 percent said older than 21. Hiring at a young age, such as 18 or 19, raises several concerns that managers must think through carefully.
The first concern is training. Corrections training has come a long way. Defensive tactics, firearms, searching and security procedures are drilled into new officers.
Traditionally, an 18- or 19-year-old has finished high school, lived at home and has had limited exposure to the “real world.” That reality matters when a young recruit enters a correctional facility, where they will encounter criminal behavior firsthand, often for the first time.
The first major issue is stress — how to manage it, cope with it and not let it take over. As I often say in my in-service classes, “this job will eat you up and spit you out if you let it.” Family support should be encouraged, along with engagement from supervisors, employee assistance programs and peer support programs, to help assess how young officers are handling job-related stress.
The second issue is manipulation. Young officers, once training is complete, enter facilities housing hardened, streetwise and institutionalized offenders. New officers may be book smart, while offenders are street smart. Manipulation training must address offender behavior and how inmates use deception, coercion and rule-bending to survive. The consequences for officers related to sexual misconduct, contraband smuggling and policy violations must be clearly communicated.
Supervisors play a critical role in helping young officers adjust to the job and, ideally, remain in the profession. They should be approachable and willing to offer guidance and advice. On every team, shift or squad, there are steady, reliable officers who can serve as mentors. These officers should be enlisted to help train and support young recruits entering the corrections profession.
— Lt. Gary Cornelius, retired in 2005 from the Fairfax County (VA) Office of the Sheriff, after serving over 27 years in the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center.
The cost of not trusting correctional officers
The correctional crisis of 2025 rests on twin pillars that threaten to collapse the entire system: employee morale and retention. These are not simple staffing problems that can be solved with signing bonuses or recruitment campaigns. They represent a fundamental betrayal of the men and women we place behind the walls with the authority, responsibility and risk of law enforcement, yet without the respect, support, or compensation their duties demand.
The politicians who grandstand about criminal justice reform have systematically failed to build meaningful accountability into crime and punishment. Instead of confronting hard truths about offender behavior and institutional discipline, they have taken the coward’s path: smearing line personnel as the problem and projecting onto correctional officers the very failures that belong to policymakers and perpetrators alike.
When an inmate assaults staff, we hear about use-of-force reviews and officer retraining. When contraband floods a facility, we hear about staff corruption rather than the systematic exploitation of institutional vulnerabilities. When violence erupts, we hear calls for de-escalation training rather than consequences for those who chose violence. This is not oversight — it is scapegoating. And officers know it.
The time has come to place genuine trust in the personnel we deploy into the trenches. These are peace officers carrying the same authority and facing greater daily risks than many street-level law enforcement professionals, yet they operate in a parallel universe where their decisions are second-guessed, their authority undermined and their expertise dismissed.
If rehabilitation is to be anything more than a hollow buzzword, it must be built on a foundation of accountability. Real accountability. Not the performative kind that produces glossy annual reports, but the kind that makes clear actions have consequences, respect for staff and institutional rules is non-negotiable, and access to programming is exactly that — a privilege earned through compliance and lost through misconduct.
Let those who serve behind the walls become the beacon of justice and discipline that brings this vision to fruition. Correctional officers do not need to be reformed — they need to be empowered. They need leadership that backs their lawful decisions, policies that recognize their professional judgment, compensation that reflects their risk and responsibility, and a criminal justice system that actually holds offenders accountable for their choices.
The alternative is what we are witnessing now: experienced officers walking away, facilities operating on fumes with skeleton crews of inexperienced staff, routine security compromises, and violence escalating in the vacuum created by institutional weakness.
Mere lip service from politicians and administrators does not enhance the correctional mission — it actively undermines it. Empty rhetoric about supporting staff while simultaneously hamstringing their authority and scapegoating them for systemic failures creates the exact conditions driving today’s staffing crisis.
The solution begins with a simple premise: trust, support and properly compensate the professionals we ask to do this impossible job. Everything else is just noise.
— Russ Hamilton is a retired sergeant from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.