Wisconsin’s top prison official wrote to the governor in 2015 with a dire warning: The state prisons were dangerously understaffed, imperiling both guards and inmates.

Five years later, two men escaped from a maximum-security Wisconsin prison that once held Jeffrey Dahmer, fleeing early one morning when four of the facility’s five watchtowers were unmanned.

Today, two of the state’s prisons have been in lockdown for months. Prison officials who initially blamed the restrictions on violent outbursts have since conceded that a shortage of guards has kept the lockdowns in place.

That should not have been a surprise. By the time the crisis began, the state had known for years that it was losing guards faster than it could replace them, an examination by The New York Times and Wisconsin Watch has found.

Almost half the jobs for guards at the state’s maximum-security prisons were unfilled in mid-2023, up from just 10 percent at the start of 2017, according to an analysis of Department of Corrections data. Overtime costs have skyrocketed, and so has the percentage of inexperienced officers in the work force.