The Department of Corrections spent more than $4 million in overtime in the fiscal year that just ended and predicts things will get worse due to overcrowding. Earlier this summer the system hit an all-time record number of inmates, with 20 forced to sleep on mattresses on the floor.
“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” said DOC Commissioner Martin Magnusson. As of last week there were 2,045 adult inmates in the system, which is set up to house 1,850. At the peak three weeks ago there were 2,060.
His department is budgeted to spend $940,000 a year in overtime, but is allowed to transfer funds within the department to fund additional hours. In the fiscal year that ended on June 30, the department clocked 185,353 hours of overtime, with almost half of it earned at the Maine State Prison.
And, that’s in a state with the smallest prison population and lowest incarceration rate in the country.
Some guards, who are volunteering to work extra shifts, are averaging 60- to 70-hour work weeks, Magnusson said. “We’ve got to try to spread it around because it becomes dangerous for them to work.”
Union agreements dictate how the overtime system operates in the department, with extra shifts given to those who volunteer based on seniority. “There are other people who really don’t want the overtime,” he said, estimating the average work week for most guards is around 50 hours.
If there are no volunteers, the department mandates overtime shifts.
Average salaries for correctional officers range from $540 to $580 per week or just about $30,000 annually. The highest paid corrections officer in the Maine State Prison in 2003 earned more than $65,000 with his overtime, based on data compiled by the department last September.
Tough work
The Maine State Prison, which houses maximum security inmates, has the worst problem, because “it tends to have a high vacancy rate…it’s a tough place to work,” Magnusson said. Last fiscal year it accounted for 47 percent of the overtime dollars spent.
The Maine Correction Center in South Windham, where the inmates were forced to sleep on the floor, accounted for 23 percent of the extra hours, with the rest distributed among the state’s six other facilities, including the two for juveniles.
The overtime is paid for by allowing other positions not directly tied to guard duty to go vacant. And, there are always posts vacant due to turnover. “We have never gone back to the Appropriations Committee for an emergency appropriation,” since the rules were changed to allow the department to move its money around to pay for overtime, Magnusson said.
Prison overtime came up in budget discussions with the Appropriations Committee earlier this year, when Sen. Richard Nass, R-York, questioned whether the system was being abused by guards calling in sick and then kicking their shift over to another guard for time-and-a-half pay.
“They’re not calling in sick for somebody else to get overtime. They’re saying, ‘please don’t give us anymore overtime,” Magnusson said.
The Legislature doesn’t want to approve more full-time bodies because it hopes the population will come down, particularly with a new sentencing and probation law passed last session. And, given the benefits state employees receive and the irregular shifts that need to be filled, it is often cheaper just to pay overtime.
“If we didn’t have overtime, we’d be spending way too much money on personnel and benefits,” Magnusson said.
While the department anticipates overtime for vacation and shift overlaps, unscheduled overtime occurs when a guard calls in sick or is called off a shift to take prisoners to medical appointments or watch a particularly dangerous or suicidal inmate.
DOC Associate Commissioner Denise Lord said it was becoming “less of a cost issue” and more of a morale problem. “We’re perilously close to that point” where the staff can’t absorb more overtime work, she said. “We can’t ask our staff to work double-shifts two or three times a week.”
Sentences increase
The problem is overcrowding and a prison population that soared when the state opened the new prison in Warren in 2002.
“We did not budget staff,” the commissioner said, because the prison population had been steady in the 1,600 to 1,700 range. “As soon as we opened,” the prison population started to go up and hasn’t stopped.
He blames the spike on an agreement among county officials to start sending more prisoners to state facilities to relieve overcrowding in the county jails. An inmate sentenced to nine months or less goes to county jail to serve time, but any time over nine months is spent with the state.
“We never saw this one coming,” Magnusson said, speculating that jail administrators and the district attorneys got together to start directing more prisoners to the state once the new prison had the room. “It must have been one heck of a meeting,” he said. “Wish we were invited.”
The other problem with overcrowding is even though Maine has one of the lowest crime rates in the country, sentences keep increasing.
Lord said 60 percent of the people being admitted to prison today are there because they had their probation revoked, either for violating the rules of probation or committing another offense. It’s a self-defeating cycle, she said, since more people are out on probation because courts are giving more split sentences i.e. time served plus probation, to cut down on prison overcrowding.
And, the Legislature keeps passing new laws that add time to offenses.
Lord said about a dozen laws were passed this session and another dozen last session that add to sentences.
The good news for the department is the Legislature did reform sentencing and probation rules in 2004 that will allow inmates to reduce their sentences through earned good time. That law allows inmates, who have good conduct and participate in prison programs, to earn, on average, seven days a month or 84 days a year that is then taken off their sentence. The old law only allowed five days a month. Those convicted of serious crime, including sex offenses, are not eligible.
The new law also limits the use of probation. Under the old system, a low-risk probationer could “end up going to jail for having three beers in the refrigerator,” Magnusson said. The intent of the legislation was “to get these lower-risk cases off the books,” he said, so the department can focus its attention on more serious offenders.
And, most controversial, the law allows the department to increase the number of people eligible for early release, who would then be under home confinement.
“They wanted us to release 200 people to save money,” said Magnusson, who fought the proposal. He finally agreed to 40 in 2007 as part of budget-cutting plan. Still it makes him nervous.
With the lowest incarceration rate in the country, he said, “when they come into our system they pretty much earned it.”
Send questions/comments to the editors.
