Corrections agencies account for a large share of New Jersey's major police discipline

The single agency with the most major discipline records in New Jersey is not a police department. It is the state Department of Corrections, which reported 577 finalized major discipline actions from 2020 through 2025.^[1] Add Camden County Corrections, with 333, and two corrections agencies alone account for 910 records.^[1] That is nearly a third of the 3,006 records in the statewide file.

This matters for anyone reading the rest of the data, because it is easy to mistake volume for a verdict.

Why corrections sits apart

Corrections officers and municipal police do different jobs under different rules, and they generate discipline for different reasons. A county jail runs booking, intake, and housing around the clock, and much of its reported discipline involves that setting. Comparing a corrections department's raw count against a suburban police department's tells you almost nothing, because the two are not doing the same work at the same scale.

This site handles that by never ranking across agency types. Corrections agencies are compared only with other corrections agencies, municipal departments only with other municipal departments. When you see the Department of Corrections graded, the peer group is the state's other corrections agencies, not its police departments.^[2]

The county jails, agency by agency

Fifteen corrections agencies appear in the data: the state department and fourteen county facilities. Their records are not spread evenly.

After the two large ones come Atlantic County Corrections with 127 records, Essex County Corrections with 62, Burlington with 52, Monmouth with 47, Hudson with 38, and Middlesex with 36.^[1] The rest are in the low double digits or below: Salem 14, Morris 11, Cumberland 10, Ocean 6, Somerset 5, Warren 1, and Cape May with none.^[1]

Camden County's 333 stands out even against the other jails. It is more than the next five county facilities combined, and it is a large part of why Camden County leads the state in major discipline records overall, a point the county article makes from the other direction. Whether that reflects a jail with more problems or a jail that reports more completely is not something the count can answer.

Corrections drove most of the statewide rise

Statewide major discipline more than tripled from 226 records in 2020 to 816 in 2025, and corrections agencies supplied the largest part of that growth. They reported 93 records in 2020, 41 percent of the year's total, and 419 in 2025, 51 percent.^[1] Municipal police departments went from 90 to 291 over the same years, a large rise but a smaller one, and their share of the file fell as the jails' share grew.^[1]

The Department of Corrections alone went from 52 records in 2020 to 219 in 2025, with the steepest step between 2024 and 2025.^[1] Read that increase carefully. Major discipline appears in the data only after all appeals conclude, in the year it became final, so a rise in a given year can reflect cases from earlier years working through appeals as much as conduct in that year. The department also reported growing internal affairs activity over the same period: 1,056 investigations in 2021, and 2,943 in 2025 against 1,548 reported officers.^[2] A larger number of investigations can mean more misconduct, or it can mean a more active internal affairs process. The record here does not settle which.

Termination is no more common in corrections

A reader might expect a large share of records to mean a large share of firings. It does not. Corrections agencies reported 210 terminations across their 1,319 records, about 16 percent, against 471 terminations across all 3,006 records statewide, also about 16 percent.^[1] The Department of Corrections runs a little above that at 136 of 577, or 24 percent.^[1]

The county jails vary widely, and the variation is worth seeing. Camden County Corrections reported 6 terminations in 333 records, under 2 percent.^[1] Essex County Corrections reported 25 in 62, about 40 percent, and Middlesex 17 in 36, nearly half.^[1] Two jails with similar workforces can arrive at very different mixes of suspension and termination, and the count of records on its own hides that entirely. The sanction columns on each department's page are where the difference shows.

The staffing figure that exists, and the ones that do not

Every comparison above uses record counts, because the denominator that would turn them into rates is mostly missing. The FBI's staffing census carries one row for the state Department of Corrections and none for the fourteen county facilities, so no county jail on this site has a sworn-officer count to divide by.^[3] The Attorney General's own officer column is not a substitute: its 1,548 for the Department of Corrections in 2025 counts officers named in that year's investigations, not officers employed.^[2] The article on agencies with no staffing figure explains what the site does instead, which is to say "not reported" and to grade the jails only against each other.

What it does not show

These are sustained, adjudicated outcomes, not allegations, and they are what the agencies themselves reported. What the numbers cannot tell you is a rate of misconduct per interaction, because there is no denominator for that in this data: no count of bookings, housing days, or use-of-force incidents. A department that runs a large jail will produce more of everything, including more discipline, without that saying anything about how often any one officer crosses a line.

The honest read is narrow and worth stating plainly. Corrections agencies carry a large share of New Jersey's major discipline, and in 2025 more than half of the year's records. Two of them carry most of that share. And the only fair comparison for any of them is another agency doing the same work.

If you find an error in how any record is presented here, the corrections page explains how to request a fix against the official record.

For background on the corrections officer civil service title itself (requirements, career path, and salary), see New Jersey's correctional police officer job listings.