Many states and countries have difficulty finding enough people willing to be prison guards. It’s not fun to be in a prison or around criminals, and prison guards can be attacked.
Immigrants are often willing to be prison guards, though. So the United Kingdom has guest-worker visas for prison officers. Prison guards in Texas and the United Kingdom are disproportionately from Nigeria.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is moving to cut off immigration from 40 countries, including Nigeria. Even though states like Texas have many Nigerian prison guards.
The BBC reports on Britain’s decision to allow guest workers from places like Nigeria to serve as prison staff:
Foreign nationals working as prison officers in the UK have been given a temporary exemption from new visa rules, following warnings some jails were facing a staffing crisis.
Prisons have increasingly been relying on overseas recruits, particularly from Nigeria and Ghana.
But organizations representing officers had warned jails faced losing thousands of staff, after the government increased the minimum salary requirement for a skilled worker visa.
The Ministry of Justice said the move would “ensure jails can continue to run safely with the right level of experienced staff”.
Nigerians help keep U.S. prisons staffed, too, as is explained in the article “Nigerians Flock to Work in U.S. Prisons“:
John Okperuvwe flew from Lagos, Nigeria, to Boston in September 2008 after winning a visa through a lottery run by the U.S. State Department….In early 2010, Okperuvwe found a friend from his college days in Lagos on Facebook. He sent a message, and they started chatting. The friend was working in a Texas prison and making good money.
Okperuvwe prayed. He felt he had little to lose, and that March, he found a cheap apartment in Houston and took the entrance exam for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (known locally as TDCJ). He passed easily. In September, TDCJ offered him a job in Huntsville, a town of 30,000, about an hour from Houston, which houses many of the state’s prisons and the agency’s headquarters…..
Over the last decade, Texas prisons have struggled to find employees and keep them….Harder to document but no less real is what National Public Radio recently termed a “cultural stigma” around guarding prisons. Correctional officers have always suffered from a lack of the esteem Americans bestow on soldiers, police officers, firefighters, and other public servants who risk violent injury and death in their work….This perception has combined with low pay and poor conditions to produce staffing shortages. Over the last few years, understaffing has been reported in numerous state prison systems, including California, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Nevada, and Virginia. Texas has more than 3,000 vacant guard positions and has tried to fill them through pay raises, recruiting bonuses up to $4000, and subsidized housing.
But the Trump administration could make filling these positions harder, by barring immigration from Nigeria. Nigeria is among 40 nations targeted by a recent Trump proclamation, which also covers nations such as Afghanistan, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Yemen, and Somalia. As David Bier of the Cato Institute explains:
President Trump signed a new proclamation that bans nearly all legal immigration from about 40 countries, covering about one in five legal immigrants from abroad and nearly 400,000 legal immigrants over three years. Although it exempts some foreign workers and travelers from certain countries, this ban does not include any categorical exemption or waiver for spouses, minor children, or parents of US citizens or legal permanent residents, making it far harsher than his prior bans.
Although the proclamation divides countries into either “full” or “partial” ban categories, this is only relevant for nonimmigrant or temporary visas. With only very minor exceptions, all permanent immigration from these countries is banned.
I don’t understand why Trump wants to ban immigration from many of these countries. Banning immigration from Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela is especially odd: Immigration from those countries has benefited the U.S. economy, and immigrants from those countries typically like America, and hate their home countries’ oppressive governments. Cuban and Venezuelan immigration helped Florida’s economy. Iranian-Americans have higher than average per capita incomes for an American, and Iranians bring useful skills with them. About 10,000 U.S. physicians are Iranian-born.
Being a prison guard is a challenging job, given how dangerous many inmates are. 63% of state prison inmates in America are doing time for violent crimes, and the typical state prison inmate is a repeat offender with 5 convictions. Being in prison for a while doesn’t mellow them out: indeed, most inmates commit more crimes after being released, even when they have already served over ten years in prison. Nationally, 81.9% of all state prisoners released in 2008 were subsequently arrested within a decade, including 74.5% of those 40 or older at the time of their release. (See Bureau of Justice Statistics, Recidivism of Prisoners in 24 States Released in 2008: A 10-Year Follow-Up Period (2008-2018), pg. 4, Table 4)).
So it is important to have enough prison guards.
