TORRINGTON – Every industry is facing a nationwide labor shortage, and the Wyoming Department of Corrections is no exception.
It’s difficult to say exactly how many open positions WDOC has right now. Like WDOC spokesperson Paul Martin said, “The actual number of vacancies changes from day to day, from minute to minute almost.
As of the writing of this article, there were 15 open positions for correctional officers and eight nonuniformed positions at the Wyoming Medium Correctional Institution in Torrington, not including contracted positions.
“We have more vacancies now that we have ever had since we opened the prison,” WMCI Warden Michael Pacheco said.
WMCI is just one of five WDOC facilities. Each one has been struggling to get fully staffed since before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Martin said the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins and the Wyoming Women’s Center in Lusk in particular have both been struggling to get full staffing coverage.
“The workforce isn’t there,” Martin said. “Wyoming is not a heavily populated state. We don’t have major metropolitan areas. So when you have a rural economy, you have to pull from the geographic area there. There just isn’t huge populations to pull from.”
Pacheco says one of the main problems causing the labor shortages within WDOC is that every industry is competing for the same employees. The problem then is those employees are choosing other jobs over WDOC and its institutions, making it increasingly difficult to find those willing to work the long hours at WMCI.
Whatever factors may be playing into WDOC’s staffing shortages, they seem to be playing across the country.
“Given the vacancies nationally that our economy is experiencing, and nationally corrections entities and the industry itself is experiencing high vacancy rates,” Martin said. “We’re not unique in this sense. We’re just one of the players.”
Each employee has a different motive to work in their industry and in their position. For some, it’s the joy and satisfaction of doing something that matters. For others, it’s wherever pays a livable wage (plus maybe a little extra). When recruiting for WMCI, Pacheco and Senior Human Resource Officer Patrick Montney try to focus on the benefits WDOC provides its employees, the most emphasized benefit being a 20-year retirement plan for correctional security and probation and parole agents. Other benefits include paid sick leave and paid vacation.
Starting pay for a correctional officer at WMCI is $17.96 per hour. Besides correctional officers, other open positions at WMCI include food services specialist, shipping and receiving clerk, plumber, recreation specialist and vocational trainer in the garment shop. Out of 302 total positions at WMCI, 279 are filled, meaning the facility is approximately 92% fully staffed.
Pacheco says Montney and the rest of human resources at WMCI are working hard to recruit more employees, both uniformed and not. Job fairs both in and out of Wyoming, Facebook and other job sites are seeing increased numbers of WDOC recruitment promos as human resources tries to reach as many interested parties as possible.
“We have tried just about everything,” Martin said about recruiting efforts in WDOC.
Until then, Pacheco takes great pride in his team at WMCI for the work they do to keep WMCI running. Many of them are consistently working overtime.
“We couldn’t do it without the staff,” he said.
As much as WMCI is “feeling the crunch,” as Pacheco puts it, the problem doesn’t seem to be people leaving so much as it is just people not applying for open positions.
A global pandemic certainly has not helped recruiting efforts. With over 62,000 COVID tests, 1,800 positive cases and 17 hospitalizations, staff are feeling the burden.
“The pandemic has taxed staff,” Martin said. “We’ve been working many, many hours of overtime, and it is naturally going to affect staff, and when there are other opportunities, it’s not unthinkable to think staff would go somewhere else.”
For more information regarding career opportunities with WDOC, visit www.wdoc.jobs.
WMCI serves as the main intake center for Wyoming inmates not sentenced to death. It has been in operation since 2010. It has the capacity to house up to 720 inmates. WMCI also serves as a primary education center for inmates, offering Adult Basic Education classes, correspondence college courses and vocational programs such as a sewing program and even a Braille program. Many of these classes are offered in partnership with Eastern Wyoming College in Torrington.
