By Jon Lender
The Hartford Courant
HARTFORD — An avalanche of 9,757 applicants for only a few hundred prison jobs has exposed weaknesses in Connecticut’s standards for hiring new correction officers, and has prompted a debate between the officers’ union and the Department of Correction about how to fix the problem.
One hotly debated issue is whether service as a veteran of the armed forces should count for more than it does under the current selection standards. Those standards give equal weight to having served in the military and having earned “some credits,” but no diploma, from a two- or four-year college.
“It is disconcerting and extremely disappointing to know that the vast majority of the women and men, who have applied for a position at the DOC and have served our country with honor and distinction, are ignored, overlooked or pushed to the back of the line,” said Moises Padilla, vice president of Cheshire Correctional Complex Employees Local 387.
Two years in Afghanistan shouldn’t equal three credits from community college, Padilla said. He attributed the problem to the department’s human resources division being “understaffed and overwhelmed by the amount of individuals that have applied for the position of correction officer.”
Correction Commissioner Scott Semple said he thinks it’s reasonable that military service count for one point of a possible six in the initial application-screening process — but he admitted that it doesn’t make sense to him that the selection standards give equal weight to an applicant’s having “taken a cooking course at a community college.”
He acknowledged that before the next time the department recruits applicants, probably in 2016, he would like to re-evaluate some of the standards that the department’s human resources division used when it began recruiting last summer.
The debate over hiring standards has assumed greater importance because so many people want so few available jobs.
Nearly 10,000 people responded to the correction department’s advertisement last summer to take a written exam to become a correction officer. About 7,100 of them took the exam, 6,100 passed, and 4,600 of them responded to the department’s posting for the current round of a few hundred available correction officer positions.
Since then, the department has selected two new classes of cadets who now are at the department’s training academy in Cheshire. One class of 87 will graduate later this month, and the other, including 203 cadets, is scheduled to graduate in June. It’s possible — but not guaranteed — that another 100 correction officers could be hired this fall, Semple said.
The number of prison guards has shrunk steadily in the past decade, as Connecticut’s inmate population has declined to about 16,500 since peaking at more than 19,000 in 2003. The number of correction officers has fallen to about 3,700 now from 7,007 statutorily authorized positions (although not all were filled) in 2004. Three Connecticut prisons have closed since 2010.
The recent explosion of correction officer applicants forced the department to depart from its past procedure of interviewing every applicant who passed the written test. “A record breaking 9,757 candidates have applied to take the CO exam,” one of the department’s human resources administrators wrote to another last August, estimating that 7,800 would get through to the interview stage.
But “our unit is physically unable to interview 7,800 applicants,” Human Resources Manager Cathy Riberio told HR Director Suzanne Smedes in an Aug. 12 interoffice memo. “This will be the first time we are not offering interviews to all candidates that pass the CO exam process. Therefore it is critical that we apply our standards equally.”
That put the standards in the spotlight, and now both the correction officers’ union and the commissioner, from their different perspectives, have expressed dissatisfaction with them. In an email a month ago, Smedes, the HR director, listed six criteria that each counted for one point in a rating system that would land an interview for applicants who passed the written test.
The criteria were: 1) Following all instructions and “providing all requested documentation"; 2) having a “stable work history (2+ years)"; 3) “related experience"; 4) college education, including a bachelor’s or associate’s degree, or “some credits"; 5) “military experience"; and 6) “no record of termination in employment history.” Candidates with four points or more would be considered for interviews.
‘Makes No Sense’
Padilla kicked off the current debate when he told The Courant last week that he’s received complaints that veterans are being shortchanged by the department’s rating system.
He added: “It is my opinion that the present selection criteria are broken, vague, a moving target, subjective and vulnerable to a multitude of different interpretations, which places an emphasis on hiring quotas as opposed to selecting the most qualified candidates to fill the significant number of vacancies within our agency.”
When Semple was asked for his reaction, he said that he thinks that one point for military service is appropriate, adding that “to me, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever” to give a candidate a full point for education no matter whether he or she earned a two-year or four-year college degree, or just got “some credits.”
He said he needs to talk to officials in the HR unit about that and other issues. One issue is building into the hiring criteria a “psychological component,” in recognition of the unique and constant stress under which correction officers work in a confined space with inmates who are often hostile or physically dangerous.
“In consideration of the trauma that folks are exposed to, we also need to take a psychological component into consideration,” Semple said. “I think there needs to be a discussion in that regard … so that we know that person has the capacity to be able to deal with the level of trauma that exists within our facilities.”
Semple said that the state police take the psychological component into account in their hiring criteria. And that’s even though police work provides greater opportunities to decompress mentally than working in a prison, he said.
Semple said that although police encounter danger, they also are out circulating in public as they perform their duties, and have more opportunities for simple things such as being thanked by the people they help. Correction officers get much less of that, he said.
Semple — who started as a correction officer in 1988, then rose through the ranks and has headed the department since the end of last August — said he hopes to revise the hiring criteria by the time the next correction officers test rolls around.
Padilla objected to one line in particular in last August’s interoffice memo by Riberio: “Not all applicants will be given an interview. Applications will be considered on a first come first serve basis….” He said it didn’t seem fair for one applicant to get an advantage simply by “getting to the post office first.”
Karen Martucci, a former correction officer and deputy warden who now serves as the department’s spokeswoman, responded that human resources officials had to start considering applications promptly, as they arrived in the mail. But she added that no one was put at a disadvantage because his or her application came in after someone else’s, as long as the application arrived by the deadline. The same point system was applied to all, she said.
Asked what accounted for the stampede of applicants for the limited number of correction officer positions, Semple said he thought it was still the longtime attraction of a hazardous-duty retirement at a young age with an annual pension of half your salary. It used to be 20-years-and-out, and now it’s 25-years-and-out before age 50 — which Semple said is still favorable.
But Padilla said he thinks that so many applied because word spread that there would be no physical fitness-and-agility test after the state had to pay a $3 million settlement two years ago to end a federal lawsuit charging that the correction department’s physical test discriminated against female applicants. “There’s no doubt in my mind that’s the reason,” Padilla said.
Padilla said he hopes that a pre-hiring physical test is reinstated by the time of the next recruitment. A consultant has been hired to develop an appropriate test by then. If any of the current recruits, who didn’t take such a test, cannot meet the physical requirements at the training academy, officials say they can be weeded out during the probationary phase of employment.
Back in 2013, Padilla blasted the state’s settlement of the lawsuit, calling it a surrender that made correction officers look like “second-class” personnel compared with state police and other first responders. The original plaintiff in what became a class action, Cherie Easterling of Bloomfield, applied in 2004 to become a correction officer and passed the written test and all parts of the physical test except a 1.5-mile run.