How Are Correctional Education Programs Staffed?

The number of correctional education instructors has failed to keep pace with increases in inmate populations over the past decade. To convince policymakers to allocate additional funds for more correctional education staff, states will need to provide them with a better understanding of staffing patterns in corrections and how these patterns may help or hinder correctional education programs. These data could answer the following types of policy questions:

States will need to improve the ability of different divisions of corrections to access data housed in various state databases.

Most states use different databases to track different parts of the corrections systems. A correctional education data analyst can therefore find it difficult to access data on variables not collected by correctional education programs, such as the number of administrators or correctional officers employed by a facility or the state. To streamline the reporting process, states should consider consolidating their databases to allow selected data analysts to access all data for reporting purposes.


States will need to record the number of volunteers participating in correctional education programs.

Many states do not maintain records on the number of volunteers who support their correctional education programs. Volunteers, however, can be a significant source of labor for some programs. For staffing data to accurately reflect the correctional education services offered by a facility, states should consider keeping better records of their volunteers.