Oregon Audit Warns Prison Facilities, Staffing and Technology Pose Safety Risks

A July audit from the Oregon Secretary of State found that deteriorating prison facilities, staffing shortages and obsolete information systems are creating safety and operational risks across the state correctional system.

The audit says the Oregon Department of Corrections has nearly $861 million in deferred-maintenance needs, reported a need for 261 additional security staff to avoid mandatory overtime based on August 2024 conditions, and relies on aging technology that supports prison operations and parole and probation offices in all 36 Oregon counties.

DOC agreed with all eight audit recommendations. Most have target completion dates at the end of the 2027-29 budget biennium. A planned exercise to simulate a catastrophic failure of the agency’s Corrections Information System is due June 30, 2029.

Maintenance costs have grown sharply

Secretary of State Report 2026-19 reviewed DOC facilities, staffing practices, the Oregon Way reform initiative and key information systems. The review covered selected institutions and did not include every DOC information system.

DOC houses more than 12,000 adults in custody across 12 state prisons. Auditors found that estimated deferred-maintenance needs increased from $568.5 million in 2020 to nearly $861 million in 2024. The figure does not include needed seismic upgrades. The audit said the backlog is continuing to grow and that funding available to address it has not kept pace.

Many facilities have problems involving lighting, ventilation, accessibility and general upkeep. The audit also said prior assessments focused on surface-level conditions and did not fully account for underground pipes or infrastructure concealed behind walls, meaning the actual need could be higher.

Oregon State Penitentiary faces long-term replacement pressure

The Oregon State Penitentiary’s original buildings date to 1866, with most housing units built in the 1950s. It is projected to become functionally obsolete in the near future. The audit cited sewer-line breaks, boiler outages, inaccessible critical services, ventilation and fire-suppression problems, high temperatures, failing HVAC systems and water damage.

That finding does not mean the penitentiary is currently closed, condemned or scheduled for immediate replacement. It means state officials face a growing need to plan for unsafe conditions and the facility’s eventual replacement or relocation.

In the 2025 legislative session, DOC requested $5 million for the first phase of a project to replace the Oregon State Penitentiary and build a centralized geriatric medical facility. The Legislature approved $3 million. The audit says DOC plans to seek additional funding in future biennia for design, engineering, contracting and construction.

Staff shortages affect operations and families

DOC told auditors that it needed 261 additional security staff to operate without mandatory overtime, based on population levels and facility capacity as of August 2024. That figure is not a current July 2026 headcount.

In June 2024, security staff across the system logged 25,240 overtime hours. Ninety-four percent of those hours were recorded at Coffee Creek, Eastern Oregon and Two Rivers correctional institutions. The audit also reported that 254 of an estimated 2,468 security positions were vacant that month.

The staffing gap has consequences beyond employee workload. Facility managers reported that family visitation hours at many institutions had been limited because of staffing shortages. Lockdowns have also sometimes been used to address staffing problems. During a lockdown, adults in custody can spend 23 or more hours a day in their cells while programming, work and recreation are canceled or restricted.

Auditors said mandatory overtime and burnout are limiting the Oregon Way, DOC’s effort to create a more normalized correctional environment and improve rehabilitation outcomes. The audit found preliminary qualitative signs of improvement, but staffing shortages, information-technology limitations and other implementation problems have made it difficult to measure results quantitatively.

Outdated systems extend the risk beyond prisons

DOC’s information-technology systems support prison operations as well as approximately 1,300 county community-corrections staff. The systems handle functions including sentencing, security-threat management, case management, education, work assignments, budgeting and finance.

Auditors described paper-based processes, outdated programming languages and legacy interfaces that are difficult to maintain or update. The report said the agency faces an extreme risk of being unable to implement critical improvements or recover effectively from a system failure. It did not find that a catastrophic failure has occurred.

What happens next

DOC agreed to develop plans for moving adults in custody out of facilities that pose significant health or safety risks and to prepare relocation strategies if conditions deteriorate to dangerous or uninhabitable levels. The agency also agreed to create a statewide employee well-being and retention strategy, improve data collection on Oregon Way results and mitigate risks in its aging information systems.

For Oregon taxpayers and lawmakers, the next major checkpoints will be DOC’s requests for the 2027-29 biennium, reports on unsafe-facility risks, staffing and retention progress, and the information-system failure exercise due in 2029. Agreement with the audit recommendations is not the same as completion, so implementation will depend on agency action, legislative funding and future public reporting.

Sources

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