CHARLESTON, W.Va. — West Virginia’s prisons, regional jails and juvenile justice facilities are in a “constant mode” of recruiting, hiring and training, according to Joe Thornton, secretary of the state Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety.
“It’s challenging at some facilities more than it is at others,” Thornton admitted, noting how quickly the available workforce can be tapped out in many parts of the Mountain State.
Currently, Thornton said, there are 217 correctional officer vacancies statewide and 110 of those jobs, 51 percent, are at two facilities — Huttonsville Correctional Center in Randolph County, a medium-security prison, and Mount Olive Correctional Complex in Fayette County, a maximum-security prison.
Of the 119 correctional officer vacancies in West Virginia’s regional jails, 68 positions or 57 percent are at the North Central Regional Jail in Doddridge County, the Potomac Highlands Regional Jail in Hampshire County and the South Central Regional Jail in Kanawha County.
In juvenile services, there are 51 correctional officer positions to fill across West Virginia and 23 of those positions, 45 percent, are within the Kenneth “Honey” Rubenstein Juvenile Center in Tucker County and the Donald R. Kuhn Juvenile Center in Boone County.
To try to better fill those vacancies, Thornton last week issued a directive to eliminate the requirement that applicants have one year of previous work experience to be considered. The policy change took effect Thursday.
“We’re willing to take this on and look at it and then crunch the numbers to see if it was beneficial or not,” the secretary said.
Pay, though, is another matter. The starting salary for a correctional officer in West Virginia is $22,500 annually, the lowest in the nation.
Thornton said the turnover rate is greater than 60 percent for regional jail employees and upwards of 50 percent for prison workers and pay is one of the main reasons cited for departures for other jobs in exit interviews.
“Budgets are tight, but we’ve got to realize those internal efficiencies to be able to go to the Legislature or go to the governor and say, ‘These are the things we’re doing to be able to save money.’ Hopefully, we can turn around and put that back into workforce investment,” said Thornton.
Other ideas to address corrections vacancies include the following:
–Scheduling the day with two 12-hour shifts instead of three eight-hour shifts. That will make it easier to cover the day, while making it easier on correctional officers who are willing to work overtime, but are burned out by the 16-hour shifts.
–Providing incentives and differential pay to correctional officers for hard-to-fill positions at the state’s highest security prisons.
–Calculating how much the overtime and high turnover are costing the taxpayers and then making the pitch that higher base pay would be a better investment.
–Building in automatic annual incremental pay raises that reward longevity.
At Huttonsville alone, vacancies for correctional officers and other non-uniformed positions currently account for about a quarter of the entire staff, but Thornton maintained such staffing shortages do not compromise safety.
“I would contend that our facilities are safe,” he said. “The folks that work for all three agencies are very committed to public safety and very committed to the jobs they do, so I do not think there’s a public safety issue, but there’s certainly an issue that we need to address.”