"Union Says Staffing Shortages Within Federal Bureau Of Prisons Leading To More Violence"

 That's the title of this Forbes article by Walter Pavlo, who does a lot of good work in this space.  You'll see a number of references to what's going on at FDC in the piece, which is worth reading:

A grievance was recently filed with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) over a recent incident involving an inmate attacking a BOP staff member. Eric Speirs, President of AFGE Local 501 in Miami, said wrote that, “Federal Detention Center (FDC) Miami, FL officials continue to place law enforcement personnel in harms way by understaffing housing units at the facility.” Speirs stated to OSHA that an inmate at FDC Miami, Horrace Harris, who was in custody on murder and carjacking charges, attacked a corrections officer with a metal shank inside a housing unit where there were 116 inmates and a sole corrections officer. The officer was wearing a protective jacket but did sustain puncture wounds. Speirs told me, “If he had not been wearing a vest, we would be dealing with a homicide.”

Attacks on staff at FDC Miami are not new Speirs said. Since 2019, there have been 23 incidences of staff being the target of inmates seeking to harm them … none of those have resulted in additional criminal prosecutions. Speirs told me in an interview, “It is frustrating when passengers on airlines can be punished, rightly, for having an altercation with a crew member, but corrections officers seem to be exempt from the same sort of protection under the law.” In October 2019, rapper Kodak Black (Bill Kapri) was involved in an incident that sent a prison corrections officer at FDC Miami to the hospital and black to a transfer center in Oklahoma. President Donald Trump commuted Black’s sentence shortly before leaving office in January 2021.

Speirs was also frustrated by the fact that the corrections officer involved in the most recent incident had only been on the job for 8 months with his previous experience being a screener at with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at Miami International Airport. “It is not that he was new that bothers me as much as he had so little training,” Speirs said of the corrections officer injured in the attack, “but this guy had not even been to the training courses at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco Georgia.” In a letter to US Representative Fredica Wilson (D-FL), Speirs wrote, “Our new personnel only receive 2 weeks of in-class training and 3 weeks hands-on at FLETC, Glynco, GA. Most State and County corrections receive 6 months of training. Officer (name withheld) was on the job for 8 months and still had not been to FLETC! Some new employees have been working around 100+ [inmates] of all security level inmates for 2 years without being to FLETC due to Covid-19 even though other federal law enforcement agencies continued training.” The BOP has been criticized for augmenting staff shortages by using non-traditional corrections officer staff to supervise the inmate population.

In addition to the most recent attack at FDC Miami, a corrections officer at the detention center was injured this morning while chasing an inmate holding a cell phone down a stairwell.