About 1.1 million people (PDF) are incarcerated every year in state prisons across the United States, and these facilities are staffed with more than 180,000 people. Every day, incarcerated people and corrections staff interact with one another in spaces that they share but have different relationships to. For corrections staff, prisons are elected workplaces. For incarcerated people, they are legally mandated places of confinement. Research rarely compares these two populations’ perspectives of the prison environment. Partnering with five state prisons and five local research institutions, the Urban Institute’s Prison Research and Innovation Initiative aimed to better understand and improve prison living and working conditions. This brief summarizes findings from three waves of climate surveys administered to thousands of incarcerated people and corrections staff in the five states by the local research partners, comparing the two groups’ perspectives.

Why This Matters

Understanding these two populations’ perceptions of these shared spaces can provide essential insights for improving prison climate, implementing data-driven changes to prison living and working conditions, and building bridges to understanding and collaboration between incarcerated people and corrections staff, groups often cast as adversaries. Furthermore, as we have learned from this study, incarcerated people and corrections staff have significantly different perspectives on the same prison environment. Understanding these divergent perspectives is a practical necessity for creating safer, more humane, more rehabilitative prisons. When nearly half of incarcerated people report inadequate food, sleep, and hygiene while most staff believe these needs are being met, the potential for meaningful reform is compromised. Closing these gaps through improved communication, participatory research, and genuine partnership between incarcerated people and staff represents an essential step toward making prisons safer for those who live and work in them.

Key Takeaways

This research highlights significant disparities in how incarcerated people and corrections staff perceive the prison environment, with incarcerated people consistently reporting more negative assessments than staff. Key findings include the following:

• Incarcerated people viewed their own conditions of confinement more negatively than corrections staff perceived them for incarcerated people.
• Incarcerated people viewed correctional practices as harsher and less dedicated to their needs compared with how corrections staff viewed them.
• Incarcerated people perceived their prisons’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic less favorably than corrections staff.
• The majority of both incarcerated people and corrections staff reported that all four of the purposes of prison they were surveyed about are important.
  • With 91.9 percent of staff agreeing, “it is important that prisons ensure public safety” received the highest reported level of agreement of any question on the staff surveys.
  • Incarcerated people agreed at the highest rates that “it is important that prisons help make changes for a better life” (65.9 percent agree) and “it is important that prisons ensure public safety” (65.7 percent agree).
  • Garnering the least support from both populations was “it is important that prisons punish people for the crimes they have committed.”

How We Did It

Local research partners surveyed incarcerated people and corrections staff across five state prisons between 2021 and 2024. In total, they administered 28 climate surveys over three waves, yielding 5,268 responses from incarcerated people and 1,750 from staff. Surveys included “cross-site” questions, asked in all facilities, across seven domains, such as conditions of confinement, correctional practices, COVID-19 pandemic responses, and the purpose of prison. Responses were anonymous and not linked across waves. Urban conducted analysis of these surveys to produce cross-site findings.