By Mike Hendricks
The Kansas City Star
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The first thing Jeffrey Beaber did when he got to work each day at the Jackson County Detention Center was check the overtime “draft list.”
All the guards looked for their names. If it was on there, more than likely you’d be pulling a double shift that day and need to arrange for child care or cancel whatever plans you’d made for after your regular shift. Refuse to work 16 hours straight and you’d be written up or fired, if it happened too often.
“The overtime is ridiculous,” said Beaber, who quit last year and now drives a truck.
“I ended up leaving because of the hours and the way they treated you. You’re in a position to fail.”
Some guards don’t mind the mandatory overtime. What with Jackson County correction officers being the lowest-paid jail guards in the metro area, they can use the extra hours.
But for others, it’s a stressful grind that can have serious consequences.
According to experts, the long hours make guards more prone to abuse prisoners, several cases of which the FBI is now investigating at the county lockup in downtown Kansas City.
“Could it lead to brutality? I suspect it could,” said Robert Worley, a professor of corrections at Lamar University in Texas. “Even if someone is willing to do it, work 16 hours, especially if it’s done repeatedly, it’s going to lead to burnout.”
A new task force is examining a number of problems at the jail, from the dreary, antiquated building itself to asking why the county failed to seek accreditation for the facility since the 1990s. Short answer for the latter: to save money, members learned this past week.
But the Department of Corrections Task Force is focusing primarily on working conditions that might have played some role in the brutality that the county says the FBI is looking into.
The committee’s formation was announced at the same time last month that county officials said they had discovered four instances where guards used excessive force this year against prisoners who were restrained and posed no threat. Injuries ranged from bruises to broken bones and, in one case, a punctured lung.
While it’s unknown whether fatigue from working overtime might have been a factor in those attacks, it’s not an unreasonable assumption. According to David Swenson, a college professor who has done extensive research looking at the role that sleep deprivation has on cops and prison guards, problems happen frequently.
“Fatigue-related irritability can result in officers antagonizing inmates,” Swenson wrote in a recent paper, “not responding appropriately to inmate needs, compromising clear personal boundaries and using excessive force.”
Watching over inmates is stressful even for well-rested guards, said Swenson, who teaches management at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minn.
“When you add to that (late night) shiftwork and overtime,” he said in an interview, “it generally reduces the quality of thinking and judgment.”
The names of the four corrections officers alleged to have physically abused inmates at the jail have not been released, nor would Jackson County officials speculate as to whether fatigue may have been a factor in those incidents or in several other instances of rough treatment that have been alleged in the weeks since the FBI probe was announced Aug. 24.
But in recent interviews and during frank testimony before the task force meeting last week, county officials agreed that detention center guards overall are underpaid and overworked.
Overtime is required because the jail is always shorthanded, setting in motion an endless cycle. Guards quit to escape the long hours, find better pay or both. That forces others to fill in, leading to more burnout and turnover.
As a result, guards at the Jackson County Detention Center are less experienced in dealing with prisoners in tense situations because most of them are short-timers. It takes three years to fully develop as a corrections officer, said Lt. Ron Bearce of the detention center, while the average guard at the jail works there two years or less.
“It does hurt us that our turnover is so high and our officers have so little experience,” Bearce told the task force.
Turnover at the jail averages 33 percent a year, compared with 16 to 20 percent for corrections officers nationally.
Poor pay
Low pay is one reason for that, said Joe Piccinini, acting director of the Jackson County Department of Corrections.
The starting wage for Jackson County correctional officers is by far the lowest in the area. At $11.45 an hour, it’s at least $4 an hour below where it ought to be, Bearce said.
Among area jails, Johnson County pays the best at $18.71 an hour. But unlike Jackson, which relies entirely on civilian corrections officers, Johnson County’s jail is run by the sheriff’s department and uses higher-paid sworn deputies exclusively to guard prisoners. Wyandotte and Cass counties also rely totally on deputies, while Clay and Platte employ a blend of civilians and law enforcement personnel.
For years, the union representing corrections officers in Jackson County has been pleading for higher wages. But Local 1707 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees has failed to get any headway with the county administration.
“It’s disappointing and sad to say the least,” said Roger Levings, the union representative for Jackson County corrections officers. “It’s like a slap in the face to them that the county administration isn’t making any overtures to give them a living wage.”
County officials say that a pay raise for jail guards is just one of the issues being considered as they refine their county budget proposal for next year, but they will wait to make any recommendations to the county legislature until after the task force completes its work Nov. 2.
Members of that group have already made it clear that they think guards are woefully underpaid.
“I feel for corrections officers because they are underpaid, overworked,” chairman Alvin Brooks said, “and dealing with the dregs of society, some who ought to be (in jail) and some who ought not be.”
Task force member John Fierro agreed, saying: “I don’t think it’s fair to the people we hire or the inmates.”
Double shifts
A pay increase alone won’t stem turnover and the resulting reliance on mandatory overtime.
Piccinini said he tries to reduce the burden as best he can. Since he replaced retired corrections chief Ken Conlee this summer, Piccinini has ended the practice of even allowing corrections officers to voluntarily work so-called double-doubles — 16 hours on, go home for eight hours, then work another 16-hour shift.
“I have given clear instructions that that should not be happening,” he said.
But he also said that, for now, mandatory overtime is the only way to keep the facility running because of the high turnover among corrections officers.
Fully staffed, the facility is budgeted for 204 full-time and 20 part-time corrections officers, not counting supervisors and other support staff. But it is almost never up to full staff.
Last week, more than 30 full-time jobs needed to be filled, and it’s not easy given the county’s reputation.
“Worst job ever,” one commenter wrote below an online job posting a few months ago on Indeed.com. “Pay sucks you’ll work overtime all the time and don’t know when.”
Others, though, wrote to say they enjoyed working at the detention center.
Piccinini says that for some, the corrections field is an appealing career with room for advancement. One way to broaden the potential pool of applicants for entry-level jobs is by lowering the minimum age for becoming a corrections officer from the current 21. Guards at Missouri state prisons need only be 18.
Piccinini said the department is also stepping up its recruitment effort and may change the work schedule to lessen the stress on corrections officers. Instead of splitting each day into three eight-hour shifts, Piccinini thinks 12-hour shifts would be preferable. That way, workers would have three days on, followed by four days off, with an eight-hour day added somewhere during a two-week pay period so it would add up to 80 hours.
“Employees love them,” he said of the 12-hour shifts, citing his experience of running the Lee’s Summit Police Department before his recent retirement.
The task force is also examining whether guard training is sufficient.
Missouri has specific requirements for state prison guards but no minimum training requirements for city and county jail guards. It’s up to each local government to come up with its own, adopt someone else’s program or go without, if it wishes.
It’s a worrisome problem in need of fixing, said Kevin Merritt of the Missouri Sheriffs’ Association.
“You have some of the lowest-paid individuals,” Merritt said, “working in the highest area of (legal) liability with the lowest training standards, as in none.”
To help lessen the chances of Missouri counties being sued by prisoners whose rights were violated, or who were injured or killed while in custody, the association offers a 120-hour course for corrections officers. It’s part of the overall training that prospective deputies receive, since most county jails in Missouri are run by the local sheriff.
For decades, Piccinini said, Jackson County corrections officers have done their own in-house training from a course that the department designed itself. Recruits shadow a corrections officer for a week, then get 98 hours of classroom training over two weeks. The county requires an additional 40 hours of training for guards on a special squad that is called in to handle unruly inmates.
The four former officers alleged to have used excessive force were members of that group, known as the Correctional Emergency Response Team.
Piccinini said he thinks all the guards need more training and is considering adopting the Missouri Sheriffs’ Association program.
Task force meetings
The task force looking into jail conditions will continue to meet weekly through the end of October, with most meetings scheduled from 3 to 5 p.m. on Thursday at the downtown courthouse.
Its chairman, Alvin Brooks, also hopes to hold public hearings. One is tentatively set for 6-8 p.m. Sept. 24 at the courthouse.