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1. So here are some REALLY interesting stats on correctional officer employment that I haven’t seen anywhere else: * As prison pops have fallen, so too has staffing. * Prisoner-to-guard ratio is fairly stable. * But since 2010, REAL spending on wages is up by 16%.pic.twitter.com/2mPf4ingmJ
2. The general decline in staffing jumped out at me and surprised me. I expected staffing to fall at a lower speed than prison populations, and it hasn’t. Though rising wages, even amidst austerity and prison population drops suggests what is happening is… unclear.pic.twitter.com/x8cMx7Ro92
3. The constancy in the guard-to-prisoner ratio is likely a good thing (it’s even improved a bit, from 5.16-to-1 to 5.12-to-1, since 2010). As we decarcerate, we need to minimize the number of South Carolina missteps, where cuts to staff appear to make prisons worse.pic.twitter.com/bmcKUQMWkg
(4. South Carolina’s story is also an always-important reminder that national-level graphs like this one surely mask a vast array of state-specific outcomes that are acting differently.)
5. The rise in total wage spending, however, is problematic (sorta). This graph understates the labor cost of prisons bc it is wages, so it ignores benefits. So, as @verainstitute has also shown, a huge portion of DOC spending is wages—don’t cut wage bill, don’t save a lot.pic.twitter.com/RaSnBiusYN
6. Again, don’t want to cut wages too much, or can’t keep staff in prisons (already an issue in many places) and that makes prisons worse. But a lot of reforms are premised on funding them from savings from prison cuts, and that means getting the wage/benefit bill down.pic.twitter.com/KfP6U0ZfDX
7. Anyway, I don’t have any deep points to make at this point; I’ve only had this data for about 30 minutes, but thought the initial results were interesting enough to blast out (stay tuned to @theappeal soon for more on this from me).
Also:
8. I feel like these results are a good reminder that right now criminology needs a lot fewer regressions and a lot more just… descriptive stat-gathering. I’d never seen these staffing trends anywhere (maybe I missed?), and all it took was some time on BLS.
9. Our understanding of what the criminal justice system looks like—not causally, but descriptively—is still SO SO thin. There are so many basic… FACTS… we just don’t know. We need to!
10. Don’t get me wrong: I’d rather tell my dean I spent this week running a hierarchical model using matched data on blah blah blah than “I entered numbers from the BLS into Excel and then ran the graphs in Stata to look cooler for Twitter.” But… we really need the latter!
Thanks for posting. Can’t say I’m surprised. And I bet the differences across states is really dramatic (eg CA vs SC).
Yeah, I agree. The BLS data is national-level, which is frustrating. I’m sure there’s some really critical variation like that.
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