The Alabama Department of Corrections will miss a July federal court deadline to hire additional correctional officers, but leadership says increased salaries and new recruiting efforts are bolstering staffing numbers after years of struggles.
Commissioner John Hamm spoke with Alabama Daily News at a correctional officer graduation ceremony at the Church of the Highlands in Montgomery, where ADOC celebrated its second class of correctional officer graduates for 2025, a class of 94 new employees. While short of the court’s 2017 order to hire an additional 2,000 officers, Hamm said his agency had still made significant progress in increasing its staff.
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“We have gotten a very good process down, and you can just tell by the number of correctional officer trainees we have in these academy classes that it’s going well,” Hamm said. “(We’re) optimistic that this is going to be the smallest graduation this year, so hopefully our next two academy classes will have over 100 in those, so it’s going really well.”
Alabama is currently facing a flurry of lawsuits from a number of entities — organizations, individuals and the federal government — over the poor conditions of its prisons, which are crowded and understaffed. In 2017, a federal judge ordered ADOC, which had 2,146 correctional officers at the time, to hire an additional 2,000 officers by 2022, though later extended that deadline to July 1, 2025.
In the years following the court order, ADOC struggled to meet the court’s demand, and instead saw its staff shrink, with the agency operating with 1,744 correctional officers as of July of 2023.
“In 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022, we lost so many correctional officers that we’re climbing out of that hole, it’s just taken some time,” Hamm said.
In 2023, salaries were increased, bumping starting pay by about $20,000 to nearly $57,000 a year, and 10% raises for existing staff.
While Hamm did not have the latest staffing numbers, ADOC’s most recent quarterly report shows that the agency has 2,038 correctional officers; hundreds more than the numbers from 2023, but still far below the additional 2,000 requested by the federal court, which would require the agency to have close to 4,000 officers.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Alexander Willis and originally published by Alabama Daily News.
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