I thought we learned from the Stanford Prison Experiment that college-age corrections officers are not a good idea. But it seems they are, now that no one over 21 is willing to stay on the job.
On May 7, the New York State legislature approved a measure to lower the minimum hiring age for Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) officers from 21 to 18. It’s assumed that Governor Kathy Hochul (D) will sign it, as comes from her own budget proposal.
“Bringing people in younger, letting them know the opportunities to work in government service, I think it’s just a smart idea,” Hochul said in April, according to the Buffalo News. “I will tell you this, it is hard to find people who want to go into law enforcement at any level … so I said, ‘Let’s get people excited about it.’ This could be their first job, but it’s a good career.”
Most corrections departments nationwide have a minimum hiring age of 21, as do most police departments. Amid the nationwide prison understaffing crisis, a handful of other states like Florida and South Carolina have already lowered the hiring age for corrections officers to 18. DOCCS is attempting to recover from the 22-day wildcat strike earlier in 2025, which resulted in about 2,000 officers being fired, but it was already 2,000 officers short before the strike.
DOCCS officers younger than 21 would have limited contact with people in custody and would work under certain restrictions, like not carrying a gun. And, as Hochul has emphasized, they would be supervised.
Supervised by whom? The 21-year-old officer who’s been on the job for two months and won’t be there much longer. The crux of the issue facing corrections departments around the country isn’t recruitment. It’s retention. An 18-year-old isn’t going to stick around longer than a 21-year-old, not until prisons become less miserable places to be.
If we can’t keep prisons staffed, then perhaps we should incarcerate fewer people.
In Georgia state prisons, the main instruction corrections officers are acting on is to lock all the doors and call a supervisor before opening them. The chain of command involves few officers who’ve been here long enough to have gained meaningful experience, and so that chain is liable to have weak links wherever pressure is applied. The result is a more volatile prison population and more easily corrupted officers, and never a facility that’s safe or secure.
Many elected officials around the country are interested in creative solutions to the understaffing crisis, but not the idea that if we can’t keep prisons staffed then perhaps we should incarcerate fewer people.
In recent years, correctional news outlet Corrections1 has done a couple of surveys asking readers what the minimum hiring age should be; the most common answer is 21, followed by “older than 21.” But Hochul argues that if we trust 18-year-olds to serve in Vietnam, there’s no reason we shouldn’t welcome them into the law enforcement family at that age. And there’s really no reason to stop there. We could bring in 16-year-olds to drive perimeter patrol cars and pay them in academic credits and real-world job experience.
The real trajectory, of course, is to answer the understaffing crisis by eliminating the requirement of human officers entirely, and handing the job over to autonomous patrol cars and AI-operated surveillance cameras and bracelets that monitor our vital signs. The new generation of 18-year-old officers will comprise the tactical squads that get summoned by AI to investigate anomalous readings in newly constructed prisons, and the maintenance crews tasked with retrofitting old prisons with AI-compliant hardware.
Image via New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision/Twitter
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