By Jeremy Blackman
Concord Monitor
CONCORD, NH — Patrick Bettens didn’t become a corrections officer for the overtime. But in the past six years, as budget constraints and declining staff counts have gripped the New Hampshire Department of Corrections, it has become a defining facet of his career. Nearly every week Bettens is asked or told with little advance notice to tack four, sometimes eight hours onto at least one of his five eight-hour evening shifts.
For Bettens, a 36-year-old father of two, the financial allure of marathon work weeks has faded. In its place: exhaustion and the knowledge that after a 16-hour shift at the state prison in Concord he typically has barely enough time to drive home, sleep for a few hours and drive back for the start of his next shift.
“That doesn’t leave much time for a life,” Bettens said.
Walk into any division of the state prison and one theme will eventually surface: getting by with less. Education and vocational training programs have fewer instructors, industry facilities are open fewer hours per day, mental health and substance abuse services have been trimmed, correctional councilors are in short supply.
Thinking for Change, a flagship cognitive behavior program at the state prison in Concord, has one facilitator and an inmate waiting list of 450, according to Administrator of Programs Tammy Sweeney.
“It’s a lot of work,” Sweeney said. “We do the best we can with what we’re given. But it gets hard.”
It seems unlikely it will get any easier. According to Department of Corrections spokesman Jeffrey Lyons, the department’s operating budget for the 2012-13 biennium was cut by $13 million after it passed, and the new, 2014-15 budget is $2 million less than that.
Though those cuts aren’t as drastic as in years past, with the prison population steadily increasing – it’s up 100 since last year alone – department officials, staff and community advocates argue that they will prove significant, further eroding in-house services, workplace morale and the likelihood that inmates leave prison better off than when they arrived.
“We certainly have gone past trimming the fat and gone into cutting into the meat of the system,” Bettens said.
Full story: N.H. Corrections Staff Feels Budget Losses