By Travis Crum
The Charleston Gazette
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Plainclothes staff members at Huttonsville Correctional Center are now required to work as correctional officers once a week to alleviate continuing guard shortages.
It’s a temporary fix as prison officials struggle to fill 35 to 37 vacancies at the medium-security prison in Randolph County, state Division of Corrections Commissioner Jim Rubenstein said Tuesday.
Correctional officer shortages, a high turnover rate and mandatory overtime are at “crisis levels” within state prisons, Rubenstein said. Low pay is the biggest contributing factor to these shortages, he said. West Virginia has the 49th-lowest starting salary for full-time correctional officers, at just $22,584.
The shortages -- coupled with chronic inmate overcrowding -- create a safety threat for tired and overworked correctional officers, Rubenstein told a legislative interim committee last week.
Within the past six months, Huttonsville has experienced a dramatic drop in correctional officers -- much larger than shortages in the past, Rubenstein said. Huttonsville is one of the largest employers in Randolph County, but the generations of staff that once populated the prison have left the region for better economic opportunities, he said.
Rubenstein said he sees similar trends in other prisons like Mount Olive Correctional Complex in Fayette County, where correctional officers are subject to mandatory 60-hour workweeks.
Huttonsville Correctional Complex can use as many as 383 employees, and is built to house 1,138 inmates.
Corrections officials are on a “recruiting mission” for Huttonsville, but it hasn’t been enough to fill the vacancies, Rubenstein said. Plainclothes units of 45 employees are required to work as uniformed correctional officers until the problem is resolved.
“This is an attempt not to wear people out and to cover posts that need to be covered,” Rubenstein said. “Sometimes [correctional officers] worked 16-hour days. We don’t want that to become an everyday occurrence.”
Huttonsville Warden Marvin Plumley made the decision requiring unit managers, case managers and correctional counselors to pick up correctional officer shifts. They began working the new shifts on Monday and all of the 45 employees are expected to work as correctional officers one day a week.
The plainclothes employees won’t need any extra training because all hires, regardless of position, take a six-week class covering a correctional officer’s job duty, Rubenstein said.
Most of the plainclothes employees have worked at the prison for many years and are experienced in dealing with inmates, he said.
“Human resource folks within the facility are putting their heads together and asking if there is something else that we could be doing,” Rubenstein said. “But we are reaching out.”
Rubenstein said recruiters go to job fairs where potential employees can take the correctional officer qualification exam. The American Correctional Association said last year that West Virginia had the nation’s worst inmate-to-guard ratio and ranked in the worst 10 states for correctional officer turnover.
State correctional officers have pushed for pay raises to help with retention, but have made little progress.