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Guards' pact guarantees waste and abuse
It's pretty clear that the top brass at the Department of Corrections regard the state budget, the official document that is supposed to guide government spending, as merely a suggestion. Corrections officials overspent their legally authorized allocations by more than a half-billion dollars last year. They have overspent allocations by a budget-busting $1.6 billion since 1999.
At recent state Senate special oversight hearings on prisons, angry legislators learned, among other things, that the department hired 1,000 workers over the past three years, most of them prison guards, without authorization. Even as hiring skyrocketed, overtime and sick leave payouts to correctional officers soared.
Already, senators have heard disturbing accounts of corruption within the state's 32 prisons, of an impenetrable "code of silence," of the abuse of inmates and intimidation of guards who report misconduct. The latest testimony documents the total absence of fiscal discipline within the prison system. The corrections budget has doubled in the last decade while the number of inmates has grown by 20 percent.
While legislators expressed shock and anger over cost overruns at corrections, they bear a big part of the blame. The labor contract with the California Correctional Peace Officers Association that Gov. Gray Davis negotiated in 2002 and lawmakers overwhelmingly ratified has contributed significantly to the problem.
Among other things, the contract gives the most senior and highest paid correctional officers priority on overtime assignments. It bars wardens from requiring prison guards who claim unusually high levels of sick leave to submit a doctor's excuse. Finally, and perhaps most shocking to senators who heard about the provision, if prison managers call a part-time employee and ask him to fill in for a sick or absent prison guard, and the part-timer declines because he's sick, the contract requires the state to pay him anyway. Essentially, the part-timer is paid for merely answering the phone.
The waste and abuse embedded in the prison guards' contract guarantees runaway prison costs. If the prison system's exploding budget is ever to be brought under control, the contract must be rewritten.
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