AZ Daily Star

Tucson, Arizona | Published: 03.15.2007

The Arizona Department of Corrections has a difficult task — it must manage the state's nearly 36,000 prisoners in a system that has too few beds and offers employees wages lower than they can garner elsewhere.

If the corrections system does its job right, the general public never hears about it. Prisons tend to attract attention only when there's a problem. But there are problems in Arizona's prisons, problems of low pay and a bed shortage. These are the sort of problems that eat away the system from within.

If allowed to fester, inaction now will likely lead to bigger problems down the road.

We venture that most Arizonans — including lawmakers — would be surprised to learn that many supervisors in prisons earn less than the officers they oversee. We were.

This is partly the result of increasing starting salaries to compete for officers against police and sheriff's departments, where employees can earn thousands of dollars more. But the pay raises didn't ripple through the entire ranks, and now 65 percent of correctional officers — that's 3,696 of 5,672 people — earn more than their immediate supervisors, correctional sergeants, according to Department of Corrections data. And an additional 74 corrections officers earn more than lieutenants and captains higher up the chain of command.

This creates a disincentive for officers to promote within the corrections system. Increased pay should go along with added responsibility, but in Arizona's prison system, it doesn't always work that way.

This upside-down pay scale erodes the supervisory staff in our prisons. Quality corrections officers who would make good managers often don't have a reason — other than a better job title — to move up within the Department of Corrections. This arrangement cheats the prisons out of supervisors with experience and weakens the entire system.

The Arizona Department of Corrections is asking for $6.2 million to move supervisory staff to the midpoint of their salary range — which would mean about a $10,000 raise for each of them. This budget request is the kind of preventive measure and investment that's necessary, but that lawmakers put off because it's not a front-and-center issue. But by the time that happens in a corrections system, the damage may already have been done.

Experience handling inmates on the job must be rewarded.

Correctional employees received an across-the-board $3,000 raise last year, which helped level the playing field between the Department of Corrections and other law-enforcement agencies. But this one-time raise didn't do anything to alleviate the salary compression.

Private-sector solutions, such as increasing pay through performance bonuses instead of a flat raise, don't always work in the public sector. This is even more true in fields where outcomes are dependent on third parties, in this case prisoners.

Corrections employees should be rewarded for innovative endeavors that help prepare inmates for their return to society, such as GED classes, parenting-skills classes, counseling and work programs — but that shouldn't be the only way.

The department also is dealing with how to juggle an increasing inmate population — which is growing at 160 per day, according to DOC figures. Arizona recently lost two leases with private prisons in Texas and now must house an additional 1,509 inmates.

This may be alleviated somewhat by a new yearlong contract, with an option for an extension, with Indiana to house 1,260 medium-security male inmates in a correctional facility outside of Indianapolis. But this isn't a satisfactory solution because it places a hardship on those inmates' families, who must journey across the country to visit their loved ones or go without seeing them.

While it's easy to brush off that consequence as just punishment for a criminal, in reality it's the children and families of prisoners who bear the brunt of that burden. Arizona must find a way to keep those inmates closer to home.

The Legislature must take these issues seriously because they affect the quality of life for those who live and work beyond prison walls. A state corrections system must be able to fill its ranks with experienced, quality officers and supervisors. And lawmakers also must keep in mind that many of these inmates will eventually return to our communities.