By Ford Turner And Mike Urban
Reading Eagle
READING, Pa. — Berks County Prison inmates were outside the walls doing all sorts of work - rolling a tarp over athletic fields at Gov. Mifflin Community Days and picking up trash at World War II Weekend and even growing tomatoes and peppers and hay - as the wardenship of George A. Wagner moved into the heart of its fourth decade.
And then much of it ended. Abruptly.
Early this year, the county stopped inmate and corrections officer involvement in many community-type efforts as it confronted soaring overtime costs.
At the prison alone, overtime for corrections officers, including holiday pay, increased 96 percent between 2009 and 2013, to $2.6 million, according to information supplied by the county. Some officers earned more than $90,000 in a single year, including overtime.
The county decided it had to take action.
According to county leaders helping to orchestrate the attack on overtime, it was triggered by a November 2013 presentation by Budget Director Robert J. Patrizio Jr. He warned that underspending in some areas of the budget - such as unfilled corrections officer positions - was no longer offsetting the rapid run-up in overtime being paid, and that the county needed to add a total of about $2 million to overtime budgets.
Reducing overtime became the county’s top budget priority, said Commissioner Kevin S. Barnhardt, who chairs the prison board.
Less than three months later, the biggest change of all at the prison became public. The prison board, without explanation, announced Wagner had retired, effective immediately, ending his 33-year run as warden.
Speculation about a link between Wagner’s sudden retirement and the overtime situation reached county leaders.
But in separate interviews Barnhardt and Patrizio emphatically said there was no connection.
Wagner “surprised us all,” Barnhardt said of the retirement.
In an interview soon after the announcement, Wagner said he left at age 62 because he wanted out of the unconventional, stressful job. Barnhardt agreed with that assessment.
He said of Wagner, “He was tired and burned out.”
Impossible to avoid
The five-year surge at the Berks prison vastly exceeded any increases in neighboring counties, according to data the Reading Eagle requested from Berks and the six adjacent counties for corrections officers’ overtime and holiday pay.
At prisons, overtime and holiday pay typically are not placed in the same category as regular wages.
In Lancaster, overtime including holiday pay for corrections officers increased by about 58 percent to $2.03 million in the five years that ended in 2013. The data revealed smaller increases in Lebanon, Schuylkill and Montgomery counties.
In Chester and Lehigh counties, the same expenditures decreased during the five-year period.
“You would be hard-pressed to find a facility that does not consistently battle overtime,” said Scott F. Martin, a Lancaster County commissioner and chairman of Lancaster’s prison board.
Corrections officers get sick, take holidays or family leave and go on vacations, noted Tim Gravette of Louisiana, a retired federal prison official and a prison management consultant.
“That leaves a hole in your roster,” Gravette said. “That is where overtime comes into play.”
Nonetheless, he said, the 96 percent increase in Berks sounded excessive.
“That is a big jump,” he said. “Something is wrong.”
Janine L. Quigley, a former chief deputy who took over as warden of the Berks prison in May, said major contributors to the run-up in prison overtime have been a shortage of officers, the necessity of closely supervising inmates with mental health needs and the requirement that corrections officers accompany inmates to hospitals.
“These instances that are out of our control, that absolutely have to be taken care of with extra manning, are what’s pushing us into some of these higher numbers,” Quigley said.
Frequently, the number of officers available to meet staffing needs on a given shift falls short by four, eight and even 10, Quigley said.
Those holes are filled by officers working overtime, at rates of time-and-a-half or double time.
She and Barnhardt said the prison has reduced overtime since July 1 with improved scheduling. Unless overtime is required due to a safety or security issue, supervisors must stay within their approved overtime budgets for the quarter. Though there are exceptions, the tighter accountability has helped, Quigley said.
Changes to speed up the hiring process will bring new officers in this year and early in 2015, reducing vacancies and helping control overtime, she said.
And some practices developed during Wagner’s tenure have been abandoned.
Focusing on priorities
For years, corrections officers who specialize in maintenance helped with electrical, plumbing and set-up work at the Reading Fair, a summer event near the prison in Bern Township. The work cost the prison $50,000 to $60,000.
Supervised inmates put up perimeter fences at World War II Weekend in Bern and collected trash during the Community Days celebration in Shillington, among other jobs.
And in 2013, inmates were busy harvesting thousands of pounds of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers grown on county-owned fields near the prison.
The prison withdrew from all those initiatives early this year.
“I still believe in community service,” Quigley said. “But we look at our main focus and put our resources there.”
Maintenance officers are an important part of an ongoing renovation project at the prison.
And inmates still go out to clean up athletic fields and clear weeds for local municipalities, Quigley said. Their supervision is carried out, if at all possible, without generating overtime.
Wagner, the former warden, told the Reading Eagle late last year that the farm provided work as well as food for inmates. He said he envisioned a thriving farm of the sort the prison had 30 years earlier.
But it was determined to be losing money and to not be part of the prison’s core mission.
Wagner couldn’t be reached for comment about the changes to his programs.
Six-digit earnings
Ten of the top 50 earners on the Berks County payroll for 2013 were corrections officers.
According to a county compensation list, all 10 made more, including overtime, than Quigley did with her $78,732 salary as a deputy warden. Three earned a total of more than $90,000 in pay during 2013.
The list identified Raymond Moore - a former Marine who will complete his 19th year as an officer at the prison on Nov. 15 - as the highest paid.
In an interview at the prison, Moore said he made about $105,000 in 2013, but pointed out that during many 80-hour pay periods he worked an additional 40 to 48 hours of overtime, filling shifts that required staffing.
Corrections officers, he said, are aware of the efforts to cut back on overtime.
“They said, ‘Good luck,’” he said. “The place has to be manned.”
Data supplied by Lancaster County showed that at least two corrections officers there made more than $80,000 in wages and overtime in 2013. In Montgomery County, one corrections officer earned regular wages and overtime at an annualized rate of $115,000 through late October.
On-the-job stress for corrections officers, Montgomery Warden Julio Algarin said, is plentiful.
He said, “It is a job a lot of people don’t understand.”
On a recent day, 1,215 inmates were under Berks County control. Most were housed in double-bunked cells with tiny sinks and toilets. Gray-shirted corrections officers were allocated to various units within the maze of block walls and heavy metal doors based on security need. Three were assigned to the disciplinary unit, where 57 of the most challenging inmates were housed.
“People throwing feces. People throwing urine,” was how Quigley described some of the behaviors within the unit.
Gravette, the consultant, said a prison is, by its nature, a sad place.
“People don’t want to be there,” he said. “They have needs and they have to be met.”
According to Algarin, questions that run through the mind of a corrections officer en route to work might include “Am I going home with blood on my uniform today?” and “Am I going to get assaulted today?”
Some officers want to work their regular shift and leave. Others will take every overtime opportunity they get.
The latter, Barnhardt said, is the approach taken by the Berks officers who make $80,000 or more a year.
Their mindset, he said, is, “I’ll take that weekend. I’ll take that holiday.”
Changing the numbers
In Montgomery County, prison overtime increased by only 15 percent in five years. Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson said the crucial points about it are “measuring it and understanding it and managing it.”
Doing that, he said, requires drilling down into details. The more the county breaks down data and looks at contributing factors, the better it manages overtime.
“It can blow out your budget if you haven’t properly accounted for it,” he said.
Lebanon County put a number in its budget for anticipated prison overtime for the first time in 2014, according to county Controller Robert Mettley.
He said, “The current board is more focused on overtime.”
A similar scenario has unfolded in Berks.
For the five years that ended in 2013, the county used the same figure, $871,000, as the amount it anticipated for overtime at the prison. For 2014, the figure has been increased to $2,070,000.
Patrizio said the same thing has been done with other department budgets that involve overtime. Year-after-year placeholder figures have been replaced by actual estimates.
The placeholder figures worked well in the past, he said, because overtime spending was negated by underspending at other places in the budget - situations that Patrizio called “favorable variances.” One of those was wages that were budgeted but unspent because positions were not filled.
Late last year, the sharp increase in prison overtime made that approach obsolete.
Balancing act
Patrizio’s pronouncement to the commissioners, he said, was this: “I have to put about $2 million more in because overtime is higher and I don’t have enough expected vacant positions to carry it.”
Patrizio said Wagner used to ask, again and again, for more corrections officers. At one point he said he needed at least 30 more.
But Patrizio characterized having some open slots as desirable.
“You don’t throw more bodies at a department because they have overtime, when structurally you are always going to have overtime,” he said. “So there is a certain amount of overtime that is a good idea.”
When the level of Berks overtime was no longer good, Patrizio sounded the alarm.
Now, the county has set up a system in which Chief Operating Officer Carl E. Geffken must approve all overtime.
Barnhardt said, “We are tracking it and studying it and saying, ‘Where are we bleeding overtime?’”
Patrizio said prison overtime was about $350,000 less in the first half of 2014 than it was in the same period of 2013.
He recalled commissioners’ reaction about a year ago when he said he would have to add $2 million to the budget.
“That got their attention,” he said.