By JAMES MERRIWEATHER
Dover Bureau reporter
08/04/2003

Delaware still is having trouble recruiting and retaining corrections officers, requiring the state to spend millions of dollars each year on training and overtime to adequately staff its prisons, state officials said.

Correction Department officials said the staffing problem is nowhere near the crisis the state faced as it struggled to outfit new prisons in the late 1990s. But it needs to be addressed to control costs and maintain safe conditions in prisons where 1,565 guards oversee nearly 6,800 inmates.

"Over four to five years, we needed 1,000 officers," Correction Commissioner Stanley W. Taylor Jr. said. "Now that that's done, our biggest job is retaining those officers."

Turnover has plagued the state since 1998, when Delaware began a 2,500-bed expansion of the prison system that was completed last year.

Corrections officers said a number of factors have made hiring replacements at Delaware's five institutions difficult, including low pay relative to nearby states and the increase in security-related jobs since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

At the peak of state hiring during the expansion, the state hired 954 new officers from 1999 to 2001, but lost 550 to resignation, firings, retirements, transfers and deaths. Guard union officials said their data show the state hired 1,200 officers from 1998 to 2002, but only 800 of them remained in November.

Maintaining a stable prison work force will become more important in coming years because many experienced corrections officers are reaching retirement age, officials said. The guard ranks already are green because of turnover and all the hiring during the expansion. Almost half the guards have less than five years on the job, officials said.

"We're dealing with very streetwise people, and that's a concern," said Sgt. Allan J. Deal, president of the correctional officers union. "They're going to test you, and the first time you give in, they've got you."

A task force appointed by Gov. Ruth Ann Minner is studying the prison staffing problem and expects to make recommendations Oct. 15. But state officials concede the panel faces a difficult chore because the main obstacle is low guard salaries - and the state has little money to spare.

"One of the things we've tried to be real clear about is we're in a budget crunch and times are tight," said state Personnel Director Lisa Blunt-Bradley, who is a member of the panel.

The starting salary for a corrections officer in Delaware is $24,310, compared with $38,888 in New Jersey, $27,019 in Pennsylvania and $26,958 in Maryland.

Guards have been working under interim agreements since a three-year contract expired in October 1999. Negotiations have failed to yield a long-term contract, which by law is limited to setting working conditions, such as the number of officers per shift, and does not govern salaries or retirement benefits. Those are set by the General Assembly.

Reducing turnover

Union officials said they would like more money but would be happy if the task force finds a way to improve such conditions as mandatory overtime and erratic shift scheduling, which add to the stress of a taxing job.

"We're not trying to come off greedy," said Sgt. Kevin Rolph, a maintenance mechanic at Delaware Correctional Center near Smyrna and head of the union's legislative committee. "We are trying to solve a problem."

The problem of high turnover among corrections officers is shared by states across the country.

Corrections USA, a 5-year-old advocacy organization based in Thayne, Wyo., lists the average annual attrition rate among state corrections departments at 16 percent, although some have turnover rates of 30 percent or higher.

Delaware's rate has been below that average, although it calculates its attrition rate using only officers who completed training and were assigned to institutions. The rate cited by Corrections USA includes probationary hires, many of whom drop out during training.

Even during the hiring crunch during the expansion, Delaware's turnover rate rose only to 12 percent or 13 percent. Taylor said he expects it to settle at about 7 percent, which would require hiring and training 100 officers a year.

In Delaware, only one in 10 applicants for a corrections officer job is hired. Most fail tests or criminal background checks, and only about 35 percent of provisional hires make it through a six-month training period. It costs the state $1,900 to train a new guard.

The bureau has 1,695 authorized correctional officer positions but only 1,565 were filled as of July. Taylor said the department is not hiring for 100 vacant jobs right now because of the state's tight budget for 2004. A state hiring freeze put into place almost a year ago made exceptions for public safety jobs such as corrections officers, but Taylor said only essential positions are being filled.

Budget squeeze

Taylor said prison staffing is better in Delaware than in many other states, where budget problems required correctional officers to be laid off and and some prisoners released early.

South Carolina's corrections director, Jon E. Ozmint, said he lost 1,400 of 7,000 prison employees, including many corrections officers, in a year's time when his $334 million budget was cut by 21 percent. At the same time, the prison population grew by 2,500 to 23,500.

"We're experiencing what everybody is experiencing because of declining revenues, except on a more painful basis," Ozmint said. "We've grown government faster than our economy has grown even in good times, and now we're paying the price for it."

In Arizona, the Department of Corrections reported in March 2001 that an audit found more than one of every six corrections officer slots was vacant in November 2000, lifting overtime costs to $10 million a year. One prison west of Phoenix reported a vacancy rate of 44.3 percent and annual turnover of 32.6 percent.

To address the problem, Arizona paid bonuses of more than $5,000 for new hires and transfers who agreed to stay on the job at least two years and boosted salaries by $100 per pay period for existing officers, which cut the vacancy rate to zero by July 1, 2001.

Delaware has not paid bonuses. But as the state strained to staff new prisons, it lowered the eligibility age from 21 to 20 and also accepted applicants scoring a 60 on the written test, the minimum passing score. The typical cutoff before the hiring push had been 75 percent, corrections officials said.

Delaware's overtime also has been too high in recent years as officers were pressed into extra duty to cope with shortages, correction officials said. Officers working in the five institutions overseen by the Bureau of Prisons put in 169,708 hours of overtime at a cost of $4.4 million in the 2003 budget year, which ended June 30.

Deal, the guard union president, said mandatory overtime and changes in work shifts is tiring officers and creates stress on families. He said he knows of several officers who were required to rotate through all three work shifts in one week's time.

"You have to be tough and able to take these things," said Deal, a control room operator at Sussex Correctional Institution. "You have to have a good relationship with your spouse, because there's a lot of stress on the job and it's hard to leave it at work."

Taylor said supervisors appreciate the strains on officers working extra time to cover staffing shortfalls and are mindful not to push too hard.

"If they're honestly too tired to work safely, they're not going to be asked to work," he said.

The state also slowed its schedule for prison expansion three years ago to allow staffing to catch up to capacity, using newly hired officers to fill vacancies in existing facilities before opening new prison wings. Some 400 badly needed new beds became available at Delaware Correctional Center near Smyrna in December 2000, but the last of them were not opened until July 2002 because of staffing shortfalls.

The salary gap

Filling jobs would help reduce overtime, and also allow supervisors to stabilize shift assignments. But that would not make up for the pay gap that leaves Delaware officers earning almost $15,000 less than the starting salary in New Jersey.

The union for years has been pushing for higher salaries and changes in pension rules that would allow retirement with full benefits after 25 or even 20 years of service, rather than the current 30.

Union officials said many of the officers who left in recent years were experienced hands who found higher-paying positions in New Jersey, other states or with the federal prison system.

Hiring corrections officers is more difficult today than it was even three years ago, said Charles Kehoe, president of the 133-year-old American Correctional Association in Lanham, Md. He said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks blunted any hiring and retention advantage that might have occurred during the economic downturn in the past 18 months.

"The whole equation shifted because there were tens of thousands of jobs created in the security area - people to guard nuclear plants, ports and docks," Kehoe said. "The upshot is that we saw a huge increase in the number of security jobs, which basically draws from the same pool of people that we draw from for correctional officers."

Taylor said the retired police officers and retirees from Dover Air Force Base, who once represented a ready pool of potential guard applicants, no longer apply in big numbers because of a wealth of more lucrative and less stressful security jobs.

Delaware's effort to find a solution coincides with the start of an American Correctional Association study paid for with a $250,000 grant from the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance. The study will try to develop a national strategy for attracting qualified corrections officer candidates.

Thomas P. Eichler, executive coordinator of Stand Up for What's Right and Just, said any studies should look at ways to shrink the prison system to reduce the demand for correctional officers. His organization advocates alternatives to incarceration and programs to address the causes of crime.

"We wouldn't need nearly the number of correctional officers we have now if we had a smaller prison system," Eichler said.

Delaware's prison population has stopped growing in recent years, after the number of inmates serving a year or more grew by 75.5 percent from 1990 to 2000. The population dropped from 7,003 in 2001 to 6,778 in 2002, according to federal statistics.

Reach James Merriweather at 567-4273 or jmerriweather@delawareonline.com.

The News Journal/GARY EMEIGH

A new class of correctional officer recruits lines up outside the Sussex Correctional Institution last month to begin a new day of training.

The News Journal/GARY EMEIGH

Instructor Donna Watson inspects correctional officer recruits last month at the Sussex Correctional Institution near Georgetown.