THOMSON, Ill. — Union leaders at the United States Penitentiary in Thomson are once again pleading for help to attract and retain staff after a string of attacks on employees this spring.
On April 5, the prison reported that a staff member had been assaulted by an inmate after a contraband cell phone was discovered. That worker was treated and released.
The attack comes just a few weeks after a guard was brought to the hospital after an alleged drug exposure during a mail screening. Three weeks before that, a different correctional officer was hospitalized and treated for a similar drug exposure while sorting mail, according to the union.
All three are why the union is calling for a higher retention bonus and a new, off-site mail screening program. Leaders hope both measures will appeal to new employees while protecting those already working.
"We've lost a lot of staff this year and the data shows that we're losing even more," said Jon Zumkehr, president of the staff union AFGE Local 4070.
In September 2021, after nearly two years of lobbying lawmakers and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Local 4070 successfully negotiated for a 25% retention bonus for its staff.
"We are thankful that we got the retention bonus, but we're also losing too," Zumkehr said.
The union hoped it would help solve the prison's chronic lack of staff. At the time, Thomson was often referred to as the most understaffed federal penitentiary in the country.
As of the last week in March, roughly one in six positions at Thomson were open — a minuscule difference from September's numbers.
"Now, we're actually pushing for a higher retention rate," Zumkehr said. "In the last six months since we've had the retention, we've also lost over 75 employees that either quit the bureau or transferred to different institutions."
He says part of the issue is that Thomson continues to cut jobs due to short staffing and budget cuts, leaving the remaining employees few options for upward mobility.
Zumkehr remembers three years ago, when the prison dissolved its shakedown team whose sole job was to search for contraband. Then in the last two months, union job reports show five more positions were cut.
"One was a case manager, the other was a counselor. We had two comm-techs. Those are jobs that normally people inside the prison would promote up to (and) they're no longer there," Zumkehr said.
It's why the union is now pressing the bureau to approve a 35% retention bonus and to implement new a new mail screening program for safety purposes.
"What we are proposing and pushing for is a mail guard system where the mail gets sent to a third party facility and it never comes into the prison," Zumkehr said.
But it's not just Local 4070 that's asking. The national AFGE Council of Prison Locals union wants the bureau to implement a mail guard system at every federal penitentiary in the country.
"We're starting to see these exposures again and that's more staff going to the hospital. Inmates themselves are overdosing," said Shane Fausey, national president of AFGE Council of Prison Locals. "At Thomson, if you put a mail guard program in place, that seriously hinders an inmate's ability to introduce hazardous narcotics."
Fausey says prison mail is used to move all kinds of drugs, saying sometimes narcotics are hidden in a letter's ink.
To combat, a mail guard system would scan and upload each letter and send that version over to the prison, as opposed to the original.
"The hazardous contraband never arrives on the property. So there is zero potential for an exposure because it can't even access the Thomson facility," Fausey said.
He estimates that implementing such a program at all 122 federal prisons would cost the bureau roughly $60 million. In the fiscal year 2021, the FOB's budget totaled $7.7 million.
"We share the same postal service as the rest of the community," Fausey said. "I would cringe at the possibility of a shipment of fentanyl heading to a federal prison and ending up in an elementary school. But truly, that is how serious it is."
Ultimately, all of these decisions will be up to federal officials. But Zumkehr and his union are hopeful that relief will come sooner rather than later.
"If we have more staff at the prison, we have more programs at the prison. We keep the inmates busy," he said. "That's the whole point of what programming and rehabilitation is about."