LEXINGTON, Okla. (AP) -- Prison guard Michael McMillen stops mid-stride on his way to an evening briefing and peers into the prison yard like a Doberman who hears a bark. He pulls his radio to his face and steps through a large mechanical iron door, and then another before running across the yard, his keys and handcuffs bouncing off his hip.

A prisoner has been stabbed and another evening shift has begun at the Lexington Assessment and Reception Center, the most short-handed prison in a state with one of the most understaffed corrections systems in the country.There are 27 unfilled positions at Lexington. On this night, there will be 58 inmates for every guard on duty. In at least one unit, a single officer will watch over more than a hundred prisoners. And now prison guards must lock down 650 inmates and investigate the stabbing.

On the grass outside the gymnasium, McMillen finds inmate Kevin Moreland bleeding and lying practically motionless. Moreland had been pierced repeatedly with a homemade shank and beaten with a lock in a sock. He will live, but will need to be hospitalized.Guards identified suspects and gathered bloody evidence.

After the commotion dies down, Capt. Wendell Davis gathers his staff to finish the interrupted evenin briefing. "People, pay attention tonight," he says. "And thank the Lord that wasn't one of us." Guards do become victims. In June at the Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite, correctional officer Joe Allen Gamble had his throat
slashed while trying to help a fellow guard who was stabbed by an enraged inmate.

Gamble, a 28-year-old father of four who took home $1,000 in pay every month -- about the same as a convenience store clerk -- died the next day in the hospital.

"As a soldier you want to die on the battlefield. That's the glorious thing, that's what you dream about," says McMillen, a 33-year-old Army veteran. "But no correctional officer wants to die on some quad. This guy had his throat slashed. He died with every bit of his blood pumping out on the ground and still managed to run out of the building. That's no way to go."

Prisons across the country have trouble attracting people who want to work for low pay in a sometimes hazardous, dirty and stressful environment, but the problem is particularly bad in Oklahoma. Out of 5,801 authorized positions in Oklahoma's corrections department, 705 are unfunded or unfilled, according to numbers supplied by the agency.Oklahoma has a ratio of 7.49 inmates per correctional officer, one of the worst in the nation. Alabama has the worst ratio at 10.37. Two states with the best inmate-to-guard ratios are Rhode Island at 2.49 and Hawaii at 2.86.

In Oklahoma, where corrections officers start at about $16,000 a year, a bill before the Legislature would increase pay for all officers by $6,000 a year and give those with direct contact with inmates an extra $300 a month in hazardous duty pay.

But extra pay is no guarantee of attracting more employees. California starts its inmates at around $33,700, but still has to rely on an active recruiting and advertising process to try to fill shortages.In Texas, officials are trying to fill 2,600 correctional officer positions after seven inmates escaped a prison in December and allegedly killed an Irving police officer.

At Lexington, staff shortages define the pace and personality of the place. Lt. Gayle Wilson, a 16-year corrections veteran, worked three double shifts last week so she could piece together two consecutive days off.She settles into a chair and shakes her head after the extra work from the afternoon stabbing iscompleted. "If I didn't do it, they'd ask me to come out here on my day off," she said. "So I'm helping them out."

Later that night, correctional officer Dave Sipple is the lone officer in charge of a 160-inmate unit tailored toward drug offenders. To deal with such numbers, a correctional officer can't afford to play the tough guy. Instead, Sipple says his job is part counselor, parent, teacher -- even priest. "I've listened to a lot of confessions," Sipple says. "You give these guys someone who will listen to them, you might as well be petting a puppy."The inmates seem to follow his every order as they go through their dinner routine.When the food arrives, Sipple leads the inmates to a door. They get their trays, plop plastic utensils on top and proceed to their cells. When Sipple orders the cells locked up, the inmates follow his order without a word of protest."The best way I can describe it is the hardest high school classroom in the world," Sipple says. "As long as the teacher is here they'll be good enough, but as soon as they're left alone or a sub steps in, they're going to act up in a minute."

McMillen says it takes a special kind of person to do this work."I always liken this kind of law enforcement to preaching; it's a calling. Not everybody is cut out for it," McMillen says. He has been a correctional officer since 1994 and is considered an old-timer. "You have to have a lot of humility. You have to humble yourself in front of peers and inmates."