This reporting is made possible by the Northern Michigan Journalism Collaborative, led by Bridge Michigan and Interlochen Public Radio, and funded by Press Forward Northern Michigan.
Angela Elkins quit her job as a corrections officer at the Upper Peninsula’s Chippewa Correctional Facility about four months ago after many months of forced 16-hour shifts.
“I would have mental breakdowns at work daily,” said Elkins, 24, who was 21 when she began working at the prison. “It's discouraging, just having to be told, ‘Yeah, you're staying,’ after … it's your sixth day in a row, and you're fed up, you're over it.”
She’s part of a wave of corrections officers at UP prisons who have quit their jobs as many say the working conditions have become intolerable and dangerous for both staff and inmates. Michigan paid $118 million for more than 2.5 million hours of mandated overtime in 2024. Current and former corrections officers say a high vacancy rate contributes to assaults by and on inmates, which are both on the rise.
But Michigan’s not alone, and most states have struggled to find lasting solutions.
States including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee have implemented significant wage hikes. West Virginia, Florida, New York and New Hampshire called in the National Guard to support prison staff. Nevada implemented new technology to assist officers. Colorado offered $7,000 signing bonuses.
Many of those states saw improvements in staffing levels, but many of those improvements were short-lived.
One big problem, said Matthew Larson, a professor at Wayne State University who serves on Michigan’s Correctional Officers Training Council, is that policymakers long ago decided to put most prisons away from population centers.
“The consequence of that is that you have far fewer people who are able to become correctional officers,” he said. So “there’s no one silver bullet” when it comes to staffing.
Michigan lawmakers passed a bill to create a new pension plan for corrections officers, but the bill is now tied up in court. In late March, the Michigan Department of Corrections launched a Safe Prisons initiative, aiming to improve living and working conditions at the state’s prisons and curb drug use and drug overdoses inside through increased staff training and technology. The state also launched a new recruitment campaign.
But past recruitment campaigns haven’t worked Up North, with state data showing recruit classes flatlining in the Upper Peninsula last year and the year before.
Many working in and around Michigan prisons believe the problems are now bigger than a pension plan could fix.
“We would sit there and we'd talk about this every night that we were mandated: Like, what do you think they can do to help? What do you think will work?” Elkins said. “I think that there's nothing they can … do at this point.”
Wisconsin saw staffing relief – but will it last?
Michigan’s neighbor Wisconsin is often cited as an example of how to fix prison staffing challenges.
A 2024 investigation by the New York Times and Wisconsin Watch found just 10 officers in one Wisconsin prison with over a thousand inmates.
Outrage led to efforts to recruit more staff. Wisconsin raised the starting wage for corrections officers from $20.29 an hour to $33 an hour in one year. In Michigan, the starting wage is still lower: $23.45, with raises scheduled every six months for the first three-and-a-half years.
Wisconsin’s efforts “had a huge impact in bringing in workers,” said Joe Peterangelo, who has analyzed corrections officer vacancy rates for the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
But it remains to be seen how long that will last. The vacancy rates are starting to rise again, though they’re still well below the levels seen at the prison system’s worst points. Retention is still a challenge, as is overcrowding in the prison system.
“Attracting people into this type of work is one thing, but then they experience the work,” Peterangelo said. “Whether they still think that $33 an hour is enough for what the job actually entails … that's a different question.”
Almost every single state saw dramatic declines in prison staffing in the years after the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Marshall Project analysis of census data, but most were already having trouble staffing prisons before.
In Pennsylvania, state officials reduced the hiring time for officers, lowered the minimum age requirement, recruited military veterans and raised wages and saw vacancy rates drop from 10% to less than 5% in two years.
In Tennessee, reforms to the state’s salary structure, combined with efforts to speed up hiring, last year resulted in the largest classes of new corrections officers since 2020, and the turnover rate among officers went down by almost 25% in one year.
Michigan prisons spokesperson Jenni Riehle said in an email to Interlochen Public Radio that the department has implemented more than $55 million in recruitment and retention bonuses over the past four years and officers have received an increase of more than 18% in combined raises since 2019.
The state prison agency has also restructured wages — officers can now earn more than $70,000 a year after 3 ½ years. The department already hires officers starting at 18 years old and employs a full-time veteran liaison.
But that hasn’t been enough to prevent the mandated overtime that’s “wreaked havoc on (officers’) mental health, on their family life and their relationships,” said state Sen. Sue Shink, D-Northfield Township, chair of the state Senate Appropriations Committee. “That's not something we ask of almost any other of our state employees.”
State Sen. John Damoose, R-Harbor Springs, visited Kinross, Newberry, and Chippewa prisons in early March and told fellow lawmakers in a floor speech that “the state is treating these officers like dogs.”
But Shink said there’s not enough money to make further salary increases a priority.
“We're looking at cutting budgets again this year,” she said.
What can Michigan do?
Larson, the Wayne State professor on Michigan’s Correctional Officers Training Council, listed a few ways the state could improve.
First would be to significantly reduce the use of mandatory overtime, as research from the American Correctional Association has shown that mandatory overtime is the number-one barrier to retaining officers.
Next would be to speed up the hiring process — though he says that can sometimes be in conflict with the efforts he’s worked on to improve training and education — and to take the issue of mental and physical well-being seriously.
“Let's offer pensions,” he said, “but let's also take that wellness piece seriously, so that correctional officers in the shorter term can have that type of stability as they approach eventual retirement, so that they can actually enjoy that pension in a meaningful way.”
There are efforts underway in Michigan to alleviate pressure on prison staff, such as a new initiative in the Jackson prisons through which an entire recruiting class is assigned to one facility.
“Our strategy here is to give the facility enough staff at once to hopefully reset some of the issues that are going on, lower the pressure a little bit, allow (new officers) to make the most difference at one time,” said Jeremy Bush, deputy director of the state’s Correctional Facilities Administration.
Larson said the state should also work to reduce the number of inmates in corrections officers’ care.
“Michigan has reduced the number of incarcerated people by a significant amount over the last 10 to 15 years,” Larson said. “But I still think that there's ways to continue chipping away at the size of our correctional population. That would reduce the challenge and burden of having to continue staffing in the way that has historically been the case.”
‘There’s just no accountability’
For Alex Munro, who worked at the UP’s Chippewa Correctional Facility for seven years before quitting at the end of March, “the big thing is just holding Lansing accountable.
“There's just no accountability. There's no confidence” in the Department of Corrections and its leadership, he said.
Munro, like former officer Elkins, spent much of the past year working multiple mandatory overtime shifts a week. Simple things like having dinner done for his three kids, watching TV or playing games with them hadn’t been possible on a regular basis for two years.
He found a new job with the Sault Tribe that pays $13 an hour less than his job at Chippewa. But he says the time with his kids will be worth it.
“We actually get to spend time together, instead of me going to work at 5:45 in the morning, before they're even up for school, and then me not getting home until they're in bed, sleeping already,” Munro said.
Elkins said the money she made at the prison helped her pay off debts and move downstate.
“That job made me financially stable, but emotionally and physically unstable,” she said.
By the time she quit, she was convincing others to join her.
“I was telling people to just quit,” she said. “Go work at Walmart. Take the pay cut. They don't deserve us to be here.”
Mardi Link and WCMU’s Jamie Mankiewicz contributed to this story.
This reporting is made possible by the Northern Michigan Journalism Collaborative, led by Bridge Michigan and Interlochen Public Radio, and funded by Press Forward Northern Michigan.
