By Ford Turner And Mike Urban
Reading Eagle
READING, Pa. — The N and O units of the Berks County Prison are where inmates with the most serious mental health problems are locked up, and they’re places where the jail’s overtime costs often run high.
The units are overloaded, and among the inmates recently treated there was a parole violator who was found to be at high risk for hurting himself and others.
While his crime wasn’t that serious, he required constant supervision while he was on suicide watch.
So for almost three months there was a correctional officer stationed around the clock outside the inmate’s cell in the medical/mental health section.
The officers would stare through the window in the inmate’s heavy green door into his cell, watching his every move in that cramped space, until the suicide watch was lifted.
Since those officers were brought in to supplement the regularly scheduled guards, they earned either time-and-a-half or double time based on an hourly rate for veteran officers that reaches $23.51.
It was an expensive process and an example of how the county’s ongoing crackdown on overtime costs won’t eliminate the expense altogether, Warden Janine L. Quigley said.
Making changes
Some costs at the Berks prison are tough to reduce.
The jail is the county’s highest departmental cost, and this year’s budget is set at $37.53 million.
There are usually more than 1,200 inmates housed there, and it requires round-the-clock staffing, with 44 officers regularly scheduled for first and second shifts and 29 for the third shift.
The costs for salary, utilities, food and medical treatment are all big, officials said.
But county and prison officials have been working to cut back costs this year by trying to reduce the 15 or so overtime shifts typically needed each day.
Between 2009 and 2013, overtime costs including holiday pay in the prison rose 96 percent to $2.6 million while longtime Warden George A. Wagner was in charge.
Wagner, who abruptly retired Jan. 31 after 33 years at the helm, said recently that he didn’t remember the overtime costs being discussed as a problem during annual budget talks with county officials.
But that changed in November, when Budget Director Robert J. Patrizio Jr. told the commissioners that the county needed to add about $2 million to its overtime budgets.
Planning the county budget for 2014, Berks officials increased projected overtime at the prison to $2,070,000 after using a projection of $871,000 in each of the previous five years.
Patrizio said budgeted amounts for overtime also increased for other departments, including Berks Heim, the emergency dispatch center, children and youth services and the detective bureau in the district attorney’s office.
All those agencies have around-the-clock or emergency aspects.
To reduce overtime costs, the county started a new scheduling system that requires supervisors to stay within their approved overtime budgets for the quarter, with some exceptions.
The prison’s hiring procedures were also changed. In early October it began using an application and interview process similar to speed dating, in which potential hires met with the people they needed to in one session, rather than taking time to meet each separately.
“It took one day instead of six weeks,” Quigley said.
In total, the hiring changes will allow the prison to fill vacancies months faster than in the past. Three applicants recently graduated from training, and six more are scheduled to graduate by January.
When they fill holes in the roster, there will be less need for overtime, Quigley said.
Special care a factor
The other big driver of prison overtime is the steady increase in the number of inmates requiring mental health and medical treatment and therefore closer supervision, and that’s a trend that won’t soon change, Quigley said.
There have been times recently when the prison has had three people in hospitals with a correctional officer accompanying each one, she said.
Inmates who require higher levels of mental health care are sent to Norristown State Hospital’s regional forensic psychiatric center, but it’s one of only two such facilities statewide that treat inmates, and its 137 beds are typically full, meaning there can be long waits for admittance.
For example, there are five Berks inmates in Norristown State Hospital and another five on the waiting list, including two who have been waiting since March, hospital CEO Edna McCutcheon said.
The rise in mental health cases in the Berks prison is partly due to the change in the type of inmate committed there, Quigley said.
More of those incarcerated in Berks have problems that require care, she said.
McCutcheon said that’s partially due to better screening, recognition and treatment of mental health problems in the criminal justice system.
The rise in prison mental health cases is occurring throughout Pennsylvania and across the country, said Sue Bensinger, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.
As budgets have been cut for community programs designed to help addicts and those with mental health problems, more of those people are going without help and landing in prison, she said.
The justice system is getting better at identifying mental health issues, but while that’s a positive step, providing more help requires more prison guards, she said.
The delays Berks has hiring new officers are also common, she said.
State prisons, too, often take three to six months to get new officers on board, she said.
Monitoring overtime
A Reading Eagle study of the six counties neighboring Berks showed the five-year increase in prison overtime costs in Berks was far higher than in the other counties.
In Lancaster there was a 58 percent increase, to $2.03 million, in the five years that ended in 2013, and smaller increases in Montgomery, Schuylkill and Lebanon counties.
In Chester County, prison overtime costs decreased to $915,000 in 2013 from about $1.58 million in 2009.
Warden D. Edward McFadden said the goal is that no one earns more than 30 percent of his salary in overtime.
“We just constantly monitor it,” he said.
For example, officers who required training used to receive that instruction during overtime shifts, he said. Now they make sure the training occurs during regular shifts and that other officers cover for them during that time.
Chester used to have inmates doing community work outside the prison, but that program was stopped, mainly because it drove up overtime costs, he said.
While Berks, too, has cut down on community work done by inmates, eliminated their farm work program and put its saw mill on hold for inmates, overtime is being generated by the ongoing $12.5 million renovation and improvement project at the prison, officials said.
Among upgrades being carried out at the prison, which was built in 1933 and expanded in 1993, are installation of cameras, improved windows, the closing of cracks, painting and installation of electronic security features.
It’s saving the county about $1 million to have inmates and guards doing some of the painting, even though the inmates require supervision that adds to overtime, Quigley said.
“It is a big project,” Patrizio said. “It is long overdue.”
The point, he said, is to make the prison more efficient and allow it to operate with the smallest staff possible.
The project is scheduled to be completed in August.