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CENTER ON JUVENILE AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE PRESS ROOM | |
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| Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, 1622 Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 | Tel: (415) 621-5661 | Fax: (415) 621-5466 |
After former Gov. Gray Davis slashed the state personnel budget by $1.1 billion last year, most departments made do with less help.
But the Department of Corrections kept spending money - enough to pay the salaries of more than 500 correctional officers whose positions were no longer funded in the budget.
Documents released last week by the Department of Finance show the state's prison system still has not made most of the job cuts that officials were ordered to make last year. On their books, prison officials simply moved the costs into a category they called the "unfunded pay blanket." Most of the costs were for overtime and part-time help.
The prison system has come under fire during recent legislative hearings for consistently ignoring its spending authority, running $500 million over budget this year, and adding 1,000 jobs to the payroll without prior authorization from the Legislature.
"(Corrections) has been making unilateral decisions about who to hire, and the hiring decisions have no relationship to the amount of money budgeted, and that needs to end," said Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, who chairs the Assembly budget committee.
Steinberg said he plans to call department officials back before his panel later this month to ask how they plan to fix their spending and accounting problems.
Prison officials said they were unable to make the cuts until they came to agreement with the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the union representing prison guards. Those talks are nearing completion, said Tip Kindel, a spokesman for the Youth and Adult Correctional Authority.
Lance Corcoran, a spokesman for the CCPOA, said overtime costs and part-time workers were essential in a business where staffing needs change constantly with the fluctuations in inmate population.
"Our workload doesn't go away," Corcoran said. "We're very concerned about staffing levels at all times."
Officials also said lawmakers have consistently given the department less money than it needs to meet the terms of its contract with prison guards and to meet the safety levels mandated by various court orders.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger may propose a solution in his revised budget in May that will take care of part of the problem by adding the equivalent of 328 new full-time staff salaries to the prison budget, Kindel said. Most of that would be used to pay overtime and part-time salaries for current workers.
At the same time, the system will lose 422 other full-time positions, for a net loss of about 100 instead of the more than 500 it was supposed to cut last year.
"It's a wash," Kindel said.
The new staffing funds will go to relieve correctional officers when prison populations increase. At the same time, the department will reduce staff costs in other areas by cutting back on nighttime programs and inmate work crews that clean up parks.
After those program cuts are made, Kindel said, the department will be able to save enough money to make up for the $500 million in overspending this year.
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