Corrections officers at Oregon’s only women’s prison referred to inmates who spoke to investigators as “informants” and decorated at least one hallway with large black paper cutouts of rats, part of an ongoing culture of intimidation and retaliation that discourages staff and incarcerated people from reporting wrongdoing, including sexual misconduct, the Oregon Capital Chronicle reported.

Those incidents, detailed in a new report from the nonprofit Oregon Justice Resource Center, occurred in the wake of a state-ordered assessment of conditions at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, a 508,000-square-foot facility that houses more than 800 people. That evaluation, released last summer, described widespread fear of retribution, inadequate supervision for inmates on suicide watch, and persistent staff shortages that led to frequent lockdowns and the cancellation of recreational activities. Those conditions negatively impacted residents’ mental health, contributing to an increase in overdoses and self-harm, according to an earlier report by the nonprofit.

Gov. Tina Kotek assembled an advisory group to craft solutions for the problems, while the state Department of Corrections proposed dozens of short-term changes to improve conditions at the prison. But things have not gotten better for inmates, who have continued to report intimidation from staff members, spoiled food and male correctional officers lingering near women’s shower facilities, advocates said.

“That silence is the thing that’s still most stunning, because if this was happening in any other sector of society, and people were being treated this way, most people would be horrified,” said Bobbin Singh, executive director of the Oregon Justice Resource Center. “And there’d be a deep investigation into what’s going on.”

State officials refused to comment on the ongoing controversy. A spokesperson for Kotek said the advocacy group is an “important voice” on the advisory panel but declined to confirm if anyone had been sanctioned or fired in connection with the allegations. A spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections was similarly vague, saying only that the agency planned to share “more specific information” about the situation in May.

Things are running more smoothly in North Carolina prisons, where turnover among correctional officers decreased from 22% in 2021 to 15% last year, a 7% drop. The system is still short-staffed, officials noted — about 39% of positions are vacant — but hiring has finally started to outpace turnover, NC Newsline reported.

“I can tell you that we’ve had a significant decline in the number of, ‘I’m unhappy, I quit,’ and that’s really where our work has focused on,” Todd Ishee, secretary of the Department of Adult Correction, said Thursday afternoon to members of the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Justice and Public Safety.

About 4,500 employees left the prison system in 2021, including retirees, people who left for undisclosed personal reasons, and those who simply hated their jobs. That number dropped to 2,070 in 2023, Ishee said. Vacancies, while still high, have also improved, decreasing from a rate of 43% in February 2023 to 39% in February 2024.

Hiring and retention problems are common in the state’s correctional facilities, both due to the grueling nature of the work and the relatively low pay. Correctional officers earn a starting salary of between $36,000 and $40,000, lower than each of the four states that border North Carolina as well as county jails, where detention officers can earn as much as $56,000 to start. The shortage is increasingly noticeable amid a surge in the state’s prison population, which totaled 31,667 people as of Friday — a capacity the state Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission had not expected to reach until 2027, Ishee said.

“As that continues to grow, it just puts the strain on our correctional officers,” he said. “What we’ve done to mitigate that 39% vacancy rate is we have closed units or multiple units in each prison to kind of lessen the strain on the number of staff that need to be available for duty.”

Still, conditions are improving. Assaults on prison employees have decreased even amid the shortage, largely due to massive security upgrades funded via $100 million allocated by the General Assembly over a six-year period. Since 2018, prisons have invested in new cameras and emergency communications systems, stun fencing, stab-resistant vests, gun replacements and an initiative to reduce unauthorized cell phone usage behind bars, among other things. The funding also included $30 million for air conditioning upgrades, which Ishee said likely contributed to the drop in turnover.

“We’re projecting great impacts on quality of life for staff, quality life for the offenders,” Ishee said. “Also, recruiting and retention. We’ve lost people because they said, ‘I can’t work here anymore, it’s too hot in these housing units.’ And so our staff at sites where we are turning on air conditioning are smiling.”

Definitely not smiling: The Utah Sheriffs’ Association, which warned political candidates this week to stop describing Utah as a “sanctuary state” for people entering the country illegally, the Utah News Dispatch reported.

“Any candidate blaming local officials for the failures of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is demonstrating to voters that they don’t understand important issues facing our state and country,” Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith, the group’s president, said in a statement released Tuesday. “It’s bizarre that Republican candidates for high office would keep repeating false statements that have been walked back by the Biden Administration. It’s even more bizarre that candidates in Utah would malign local law enforcement without first knowing the facts.”

The statement, released under the all-caps heading “STOP DEMAGOGUING ISSUES YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND,” didn’t name names. But the intended audience likely included at least two specific GOP candidates/prominent sanctuary state whiners: Trent Staggs, a U.S. Senate hopeful, and state Rep. Phil Lyman, currently running for governor.

Let’s begin with Staggs, a Utah mayor who arguably started this whole mess in October by flagging a memo in which the director of the Salt Lake City ICE field office claimed that the department’s“law enforcement capabilities” had been “destabilized” after county sheriffs severed contracts that had allowed the federal agency to use local jails to house migrants awaiting detention hearings. The memo, drafted in May, was eventually rescinded, but only after Staggs posted it (and his related thoughts) online, turning it into a whole big thing.

“I was horrified to learn that the Salt Lake City Field Office … had to designate Utah earlier this year as a sanctuary state,” Staggs said at the time. “Public service is a public trust to uphold the laws duly enacted. We must rectify all limitations and restrictions in Utah that impede ICE from enforcing our nation’s immigration laws.”

This did not go over well with Smith, who released a statement rebuking Staggs by name for his “naive and uninformed” attempt to blame state officials for a federal issue. The memo wasn’t even accurate, he added — the state’s jails did not house “violent immigrants,” just migrants on civil holds, which isn’t really what jails are for. Staggs responded with a statement of his own, expressing his disappointment with the “name-calling and uncivil dialogue,” which he described as “unbecoming.” Still, it seemed to work — since then, Staggs has not referred to Utah as a sanctuary state.

Enter Lyman, who was all too happy to carry the “sanctuary state” torch into his gubernatorial campaign, which has focused largely on criticizing Gov. Spencer Cox’s immigration policies. Lyman deployed the term as recently as Wednesday, when he issued a call on social media for someone to “explain to me how we are not operating as a Sanctuary State.” The state’s immigration failures are “purely an executive level function of executive level action,” he said last week.

“Why do we bow down and comply with ridiculous federal regulations and then allow them to put a label on us, when all we have to do is say, ‘We’re the state of Utah and we enforce our laws, period,’” he continued.

Look, I have literally no idea what he’s talking about, but I don’t really care, because I don’t think he does, either. Smith appeared to concur, urging candidates to please speak to a local sheriff about the basics of immigration policy before parroting the term “sanctuary state.”

“Unfortunately, these candidates have not even bothered to ask a sheriff about the issues,” he said. “If they had, they would know that anyone arrested for criminal charges in Utah are processed through the Utah justice system, regardless of their citizenship status. We have individuals who are in this country illegally and who have broken state laws that are in our jails right now. Those criminal charges go through our state courts just like they would for anybody else.”