By Ryan Tarinelli, CQ-Roll Call
WASHINGTON — T.J. Gamble, a federal correctional officer, started a more than 10-hour road trip to Washington this weekend fresh off a grueling work schedule: He’d worked 16-hour shifts for 16 consecutive days.
Gamble, who works at a federal prison in a rural part of southeastern Michigan, was headed to Capitol Hill as part of a larger advocacy blitz for higher pay for employees within the federal Bureau of Prisons, a push to help address the agency’s staffing woes.
“I’d gotten off of work from my last 16-hour shift, went home and slept for a couple hours, and then we got in the car and we came out here,” he said in the cafeteria of the Longworth House Office Building between meetings with congressional offices Monday.
During the 16-day stretch, Gamble chose to work on his scheduled off days, filling vacant posts to help his coworkers, he said. “That’s how short they are,” he said. “All shifts, all days — doesn’t matter. There’s vacancies everywhere.”
He and other members of the Council of Prison Locals met with congressional offices this week. The union is pushing for funding for higher salaries in a bid to combat the federal prison system’s perennial staffing crisis, an issue that’s been linked to prisoner deaths and a cascade of operational problems at the agency.
The pay structure at the bureau lags behind other law enforcement agencies, such as the U.S. Marshals Service and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to the union, and the BOP’s pay scale is “non-competitive” with law enforcement spots at state and local agencies.
Meanwhile, although some congressional members have raised concerns over staffing issues and the competitiveness of correctional officer pay, Congress provided no increase to the BOP’s salaries and expenses account in fiscal 2024. The $8.39 billion allocation in the fiscal 2024 spending package came despite both the House and Senate previously proposing an increase.
And last year, appropriators in the Republican-led House proposed no increase in salary funding for fiscal 2025, while lawmakers in the then Democratic-run Senate suggested a 1 percent increase.
Those figures could be thrown out the window this Congress, with the Trump administration and the new Senate Republican majority getting to wield their influence over the appropriations process.
Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., who leads the House Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations Subcommittee, said in an interview last month that “more money is always helpful.”
“But in a challenging fiscal environment, which we are in, the subcommittee must ensure that BOP has a strategic plan for addressing those needs, and it has to demonstrate how it can meaningfully apply any additional funds and ensure measurable progress in reducing vacancies,” Rogers said.
There are signs the bureau could be a focus for new Attorney General Pam Bondi, who at her confirmation hearing said the agency had suffered from years of mismanagement, lack of funding and low morale.
“We have to fix the Bureau of Prisons, and I am looking on both sides of the aisle,” she said in her opening remarks.
Gathering spot
On Monday, members of the union started their day at 7:30 a.m. in the windowless conference room of a downtown Washington hotel, getting a rundown of the priorities they would raise in meetings later that day on the Hill.
Funding was a top focus. “I know staffing and asking for more money is not a popular thing right now,” Brandy Moore White, national president for the Council of Prison Locals, told her members. “But guys, we can’t not ask. We’re sinking. We’ve been sinking.”
There are reports to prove that, too. Congressional testimony and watchdog reports have outlined perpetual and dire staffing issues at the BOP, with one report from the office of the Justice Department’s inspector general saying the agency “specifically identified insufficient staffing as an issue” in at least 30 of the prisoner deaths reviewed by the office.
“Everything leads back to staffing,” White said in an interview.
But the issue is the money. Another union official pulled up a picture of an employment advertisement for Buc-ee’s, the convenience store chain. It features a range of pay. A restroom crew worker could make $20 an hour, a department manager could make up to $33 an hour and an assistant food service manager could make up to $42 an hour.
“If you went to all the meetings with me today, at some point, I’m going to say Buc-ee’s,” she said.
Nobody wants to work in a prison “when you can go to a gas station and make the same money,” White said.
BOP employees also have to grapple with mandatory overtime. Gamble, the correctional officer from Michigan, said that employees can be ordered to work mandatory overtime with as little as two hours’ notice, and refusal to work can result in a disciplinary case and can lead to suspension.
Mandatory overtime can also fall on holidays, too. For the last three years, Gamble said he’s been forced to work overtime on Halloween.
“The last three years — yep, yep — no trick-or-treating with my kids,” he said.
©2025 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Originally Published:
