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's corrections department, 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 25 corrections agencies, not its police departments.^[2]

What the Department of Corrections numbers show

The department's major discipline rose sharply over the six years, from 52 records in 2020 to 219 in 2025.^[1] Of its 577 records, 136 were terminations.^[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.

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. 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.