Nursing Workforce
What will the Correctional Nursing nursing workforce look like in 2030?
Correctional nursing is a vital yet often misunderstood specialty across healthcare, including within nursing itself. In 2022, an estimated 63,746 registered nurses provided care to 1.9 million incarcerated people across:
- 1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails
- 1,323 juvenile facilities, 142 immigration detention centers, 80 Indian Nation jails
- Plus military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and U.S. territory prisons
The U.S. spends at least $182 billion annually on this system. Importantly, this RN estimate excludes LPN/LVN nurses, so the true correctional nursing workforce is larger. Today, carceral systems depend on these nurses.
Nursing Workforce Resources:
- State of the world’s nursing 2025
- Unlocking the Value of Nursing in Health Care (2024)
- International Council of Nurses- Recover to Build (2023)
- National League for Nursing Healthful Work Environment Toolkit© (2018))
- 2024 Public Health Learning Forum: Workforce Development in Action
- Nurse-Staffing-Task-force-imperatives-recommendations-and-actions.pdf
- Healthy Work Survey – Employers | Healthy Work Campaign
- National Training, Education, and Workforce Survey (NTEWS) - NTEWS
- Can RNs Help with the Corrections Nurse Shortage?
- Jail Healthcare Staffing in the US Southeast: a Cross-Sectional Survey
- Nurse Staffing at State Prisons-Legislative Report- NC
- Why jails and prisons can’t recruit their way out of the understaffing crisis
- Distribution and Specialties of Broadly Versus Narrowly Defined Public Health Nurses Working in Government Settings in the United States, 2022