Corrections_Today_January_February_2024_Vol.86_No.1

NEWS&VIEWS

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Overcoming critical staffing shortages with OSINT By Mark Wasson, Solution Engineer, North America at Cobwebs Technologies

Department of Corrections’ 54 facili ties is currently about 45% while in Cumberland County, Maine’s largest county, only 52 of the 128 budgeted positions for corrections officers are filled, according to prison officials. For inmates, understaffing can lead to reduced supervision and monitoring. This may result in increased violence, contraband, and rule violations among the inmate population. Lack of staff also means less access to programs, education, healthcare and other rehabilitative services for inmates. Under these conditions, correc tions officers are being overworked, working overtime more frequently and back-to-back double shifts. This leads to officer burnout, fatigue and higher stress levels, which negatively impacts officer safety and wellbeing. Meanwhile, the exponential growth of data from many sources presents major challenges for cor rectional officers and intelligence units. As prison officials grapple with critical staff shortages, there are simply not enough personnel to manually analyze all this data and derive actionable intelligence. Yet, correctional officers are expected to perform more tasks and quicker. The challenge is to correlate and analyze data for more informed

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T he corrections system faces a perfect storm — the con vergence of critical staffing shortages, an aging workforce, and rapidly expanding volumes of data. The workforce shortage stems from challenges in recruiting and retaining staff because of demanding working conditions, lack of public funding, and competition from other fields. At the same time, prisons are seeing more experienced staff retire. The staff shortages coincide with the need to gather and analyze available data from a myriad of sources such as inmate and case management systems, as well as online accounts for investigations and the monitor ing and supervision of inmates and facilities.

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) can give understaffed facilities expanded visibility to predict, detect and prevent illegal activity and potential violence be tween inmates and keep prison staff and facilities safe. OSINT amplifies the reach and effectiveness of cor rectional officers and investigative teams. By leveraging open-source data, a small group can monitor a much broader area of interest. Dealing with the consequences of staff shortages Across the country, states are struggling with staff shortages. Most prisons are running between 20 to 30 percent under capacity. The job vacancy rate at the Georgia

22 — January/February 2024 Corrections Today