Nick Marco left his job as a corrections officer at a maximum security Upper Peninsula prison after an inmate stabbed him in the neck with a handmade weapon.
“If you’re assaulted, you almost always have zero backup for a very long time,” he said. “At that point, to be frank, it’s animalistic. Kill or be killed, essentially. Not a career, not public service, no rules or honor.”
Stories like Marco’s can be told frequently across Michigan’s short-staffed Upper Peninsula prisons, where officers struggle to control inmates and often have little or no help when an assault happens.
Michigan Department of Corrections data shows chronic officer vacancies throughout all of Michigan’s 26 prisons, but no region has been hit harder than the UP, where a quarter of the state’s inmates are housed but nearly three-quarters of staff assaults happen.
Current and former corrections officers say that’s because a third or more of positions remain open. Insiders say overtime mandates have thinned the ranks of experienced officers, making the job potentially life-threatening for those who stay.
It’s a nationwide problem exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and no state has yet found a lasting solution. Pay raises and staff wellness programs haven’t worked, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. Some states have called in the National Guard to police prisons, while other states ponder drones.
More to the story
Michigan not alone in prison crisis: ‘There’s no one silver bullet’
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.
The situation is especially dire in the remote, sparsely populated UP, where vacancy rates range from 10% at the low-security prison in Newberry to 35% at the high-security prison in Munising.
A year ago, state auditors found 61% of the more than 100 corrections staffers at the UP’s Baraga Correctional Facility were considering leaving their jobs because of excessive mandated overtime.
An entry-level corrections officer can make $100,000 a year or more with overtime. But most Baraga staffers told auditors shortages — and the resultant 16-hour days they’re often mandated to work — were the cause of mental or physical harm to themselves, their coworkers or inmates.
“We’re in a death spiral,” said state Rep. Dave Prestin, R-Cedar River, whose district includes a big chunk of the UP and who witnessed an assault on a prison administrator during a 2024 tour of the Chippewa Correctional Facility in Kincheloe.
Corrections Director Heidi Washington did not respond to requests for comment on this story but said during a recent legislative hearing that staffing was “on the forefront of everybody’s mind.” The department recently launched a new safety initiative that provides new training and technology to corrections officers and started a new officer recruitment campaign to bolster prison staff.
But Byron Osborn is a 31-year veteran of the Department of Corrections and president of the state’s corrections officers union. He helped lead the 2024 Chippewa tour during which the inmate attacked the official.
He said Lansing lacks the political will to address corrections officer working conditions.
“It’s going to take national news — CNN or Fox News — in Michigan asking why there’s a prison on fire,” Osborn said.
‘Just not worth it’
Michigan operates 26 prisons housing about 33,000 inmates, according to the department, with capacity for as many as 8,000 inmates in the six UP prisons.
While staffing corrections officer positions has been a challenge in many prisons (the average vacancy rate is about 16%), in the Upper Peninsula, only Newberry, a low-security facility, has consistently reported a vacancy rate below 10%.
The most recent Department of Corrections data from January shows significantly higher vacancy rates at the UP’s other five prisons, which each house some of the most dangerous inmates: 35% at Alger Correctional Facility in Munising, 34% in Baraga, 29% at Chippewa, 28% at Kinross Correctional Facility in Kincheloe and 30% at Marquette Branch Prison in Marquette.
Meanwhile, there were 355 assaults against prison employees in 2025 — 256 in UP facilities — according to the most recent state report. That’s up from 299 assaults in 2024. Assaults on inmates jumped to 527 last year from 481 in 2024.
Recently, the Michigan State Police opened an investigation into the April 15 death of an inmate at Chippewa during what the state said was an altercation in his assigned cell.
Current and former corrections officers told the Northern Michigan Journalism Collaborative assaults are up because continuous overtime shifts make protecting themselves, their coworkers and high-security inmates a near impossibility. That’s especially true in facilities where some stations aren’t staffed at all because there’s no one to assign.
Marco, the former corrections officer who said he narrowly escaped a catastrophic injury — “It would have hit my carotid artery had I not blocked it,” he said — still worries for his former colleagues and supervisors.
“No reasonable person would subject themselves to the strains of high-security prison work, in a not-supportive political climate for law enforcement, for $25 to $34 an hour with no pension if they have other alternatives,” he said. “Its just not worth it.”
Osborn, the union president, said a history of cost-cutting by the Legislature made the job less attractive when compared to other employers offering safer working conditions and schedules that allow for family time.
In 1997, the state cut costs by shifting Department of Corrections and other state employees’ retirement benefits from a state pension system to a portable 401(k)/457 plan. In 2012, lawmakers eliminated retiree health care coverage for state employees.
“Now the state is paying the price for those decisions,” Osborn said.
Over the years, as corrections officers retired, fewer people were hired in. If they did hire in, he said, they didn’t stay long.
Recruiting efforts up
Corrections officials say they’re doing what they can.
The department has responded to the staffing shortage by identifying barriers to corrections jobs and increasing outreach to potential new hires. The Department of Corrections hosted 117 recruitment events in 2016. Last year, it hosted 342.
Events include open houses at Michigan Works! offices, job fairs and reaching out to former employees and those laid off from other state and private sector jobs.
Jeremy Bush, deputy director of corrections facility administration for the Department of Corrections, called attention to the new Safe Prisons Initiative, which aims to provide corrections officers with training and technology specific to day-to-day needs, improve inmate programming and review segregation needs for high-security inmates.
Still, what was once a career with competitive pay and benefits at which officers worked alongside family and friends is today an exhausting and dangerous job at which years of 16-hour shifts harm officers’ mental health and erode their families, Osborn said.
In 2024, the Legislature passed bills that would have allowed corrections officers to buy into the Michigan State Police’s pension plan — which proponents said would improve corrections officer recruitment and encourage current officers to stay.
The bills never made it to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and are currently tangled up in a lawsuit expected to go before the Michigan Supreme Court in May.
Washington, the corrections director, told a state Senate appropriations subcommittee in March her department’s proposed $2.2 billion 2027 budget prioritizes staff. She told lawmakers some facility staffing issues had been “stabilized,” while others had not.
“We are working to support . . . every facility throughout the state,” she told lawmakers.
A 3% raise takes effect Oct. 1, she said, putting the starting pay for corrections officers at near $50,000 a year. After about four years on the job and achieving the top step, officers can make more than $75,000.
Washington said 760 new officers graduated from state corrections academies in 2025. As of April 7, 657 of those were still working, a department spokesperson said.
Prestin, the UP lawmaker, said the number of new hires isn’t meeting the demand.
“Out of the new corrections officer academy that’s just coming out, Baraga (is) receiving no corrections officers,” he said.
Marco, the former corrections officer, said he took the job because the $25-per-hour starting pay was significantly better than the $17 per hour he was making as a line cook. After three or four years on the job, he could make $34 an hour.
After he was assaulted, his long-term financial future didn’t support the risk.
“I’ll be blunt about what I would tell Lansing,” he said. “I make what I made at the facility waiting tables and flipping burgers,” and there are no threats on his life.
Interlochen Public Radio’s Claire Keenan-Kurgan and WCMU’s Jamie Mankiewicz contributed to this story.
