By Rich Lord
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
PITTSBURGH — A corrections officer at the Allegheny County Jail earned more than $171,000 last year, and 15 guards worked enough overtime to push their pay above the warden’s during a year in which the lockup dished out $5.5 million for extra hours worked.
The total overtime payout for jail employees has jumped by at least 67 percent since 2012, when the top earner made about $115,000.
“We’re always trying to control overtime,” said county manager William McKain, adding that the staffing and training needs of an always-open facility, coupled with a union contract and rights to vacation, sick time and family leave, require extra hours.
Corrections experts said that in stressful workplaces, rising overtime can create a vicious cycle.
Overtime “especially in a jail, is a downward spiral,” said Rod Miller, a corrections consultant with Gettysburg-based Community Resource Services Inc., who has coached the Allegheny County Jail on staffing. It can spur illness and accidents that, in turn, require more overtime.
“When there’s a lot of overtime, your working conditions become worse,” said Mr. Miller. “You’re working with zombies. You are a zombie.”
Though earnings figures suggest some officers are pushing 70-hour weeks, Warden Orlando Harper hasn’t seen any walking-dead guards in his lockup.
“If a corrections officer works that many hours, it could affect their performance,” he acknowledged. “If we should see something like that occurring, we would remedy that.”
Overall compensation for jail employees has edged up a modest 12 percent since 2012, when Mr. Harper started. But overtime rose to 15 percent of total compensation last year from 10 percent in 2012, based on figures from the manager’s office. [see chart]
“I think it’s a systemic over-reliance on overtime, which I don’t believe is serving the jail well when you see that increasing annually,” said County Controller Chelsa Wagner, whose office calculated a higher total of $5.8 million in jail overtime last year. “Fiscally, it certainly doesn’t make sense. … It doesn’t make sense in terms of morale issues and employee-safety issues.”
Mr. Harper said he has to assign overtime to cover the posts of officers attending the increased training he has required. The union contract demands that he offer extra shifts first to employees with high seniority, and thus higher base rates. If no one takes the shift, he must order someone to work, starting at the low end of the seniority list.
“Sometimes we have to force corrections officers to work,” he said. “Officers are forced frequently.”
“Some counties will say that’s what we want to do; we don’t want to pay [more] full-time employees and pay their benefits after they retire,” so they instead run up overtime, said Dennis Liebert, a Colorado-based consultant who worked in corrections in that state and in Florida. “That lends to increased liability if they’re not as sharp as they need to be to observe any kind of signs that there’s something going on in the jail, or that an inmate is having a problem.”
Mr. Harper said he continues to hire to fill vacancies in the ranks of 420 full-time officers. The jail has hired about 60 new officers in each of the past two years, and expects similar hiring this year.
Overtime payments to veteran officers can ripple into the future.
In Allegheny County, pension calculations for officers hired before 2014 include their overtime earnings. That can have a big impact when regular pay is around $74,000 and overtime approaches $97,000, as was the case with the jail’s top-paid corrections officer last year.
According to the controller’s office, that highest-earning officer, if he were to take a full retirement today, could collect a pension of about $76,250 a year. (Recent hires will get pensions based only on base salary and 10 percent of overtime pay.)
A leader of the corrections officers’ union declined comment. Jail captains, majors, deputy wardens and wardens don’t get overtime. Captains’ pay tops out at about $80,000, capping their pensions at about $40,000.
The jail has seen significant turnover in its top ranks. Of the warden’s 17 top deputies, majors and captains in place in 2014, four have since retired, two left for other jobs and two captains were fired.
“I don’t think it’s unusual,” said Mr. Harper.
Copyright 2016 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette