By C1 Staff
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Struggling to staff its prisons, the Kansas Department of Corrections recently dropped the hiring age for correctional officers to 18 years old.
Executive Director of the Kansas Organization of State Employees Rebecca Proctor is concerned that 18 may be too young, according to KAKE.
“It’s the feeling of man of our longer-term officers that some of these 18-year-olds, fresh out of high school, simply don’t have the life experiences necessary to try and deal with some of those issues,” Proctor said.
The Hutchinson Correctional Facility recently hired one 18-year-old for one of its currently vacant 36 positions, which represents about 16 percent of the staffing within the facility.
Currently working officers are tasked with a lot of overtime to ensure that the prisons are properly maintained and supervised.
“We currently are staffing our positions,” Dirk Moss, a spokesperson for HCF, said. “A lot of it is with overtime but we do maintain a full shift and so the security of the facility is not jeopardized.”
Proctor believes that hiring will be low until there are pay raises for the positions.
“Our officers have not seen a pay increase in years,” she said. “And that’s because our legislature has failed to allocate funds to provide for a pay increase.”
The current starting wage for a correctional officer in Kansas is $13.61 plus benefits.