8 NOVEMBER 9-15, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | doubled since 2019. As of last spring, the CDOC had 1,600 unfi lled jobs, roughly a quarter of its budgeted workforce of 6,400 full-time employees. Out of more than 4,000 positions for correctional offi cers in nineteen state prisons, it had only 3,132 bodies on hand. For more specialized clinical posi- tions, such as nurses, psychologists and social workers, the vacancy rate was 40 percent or more. Post-COVID hiring headaches aren’t exclusive to corrections, of course. Colora- do’s booming economy, low unemployment rate and high housing costs have posed a challenge for many local and state agencies as they try to replenish depleted ranks of health-care workers, police offi cers, fi rst responders and even snowplow operators. But the staffi ng issues inside the state’s pris- ons are particularly serious — all the more so because the shortage, while largely invisible to people outside prison walls, could have profound impacts on public safety and the criminal justice system for years to come. The problem is national in scope. Short- handedness has led to lockdowns and unrest in sweltering prisons in the Southwest and prompted Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to dispatch National Guard troops to beef up security at nine state prisons. Psychiatrists and doctors working for California’s penal system have threatened to strike, saying that staffi ng shortages are endangering patients and caregivers. Union reps at the federal prison complex in Florence have complained about reassignments, mandatory overtime and badly outnumbered offi cers vulnerable to assault in the most dangerous units. The CDOC has sought to address its staffi ng problem in various ways, including substantial outlays of hard, cold cash from its billion-dollar annual budget. It has bumped up pay — minimum starting salary for a corrections offi cer is now around $4,500 a month, a 22 percent increase from 2022 — and expected to spend close to $50 million on overtime pay in the most recent fi scal year, more than twice what it expended in 2020. It’s sent recruiters across the Midwest and as far as Puerto Rico, offering signing and referral bonuses and special deals on relocation and housing stipends, even as headhunters from other corrections agen- cies woo Colorado offi cers to neighboring states. It’s lowered training requirements, no longer bans off-duty marijuana use, and now welcomes applicants as young as eighteen. In recent months, the agency has man- aged to dramatically increase the number of job applications it receives, probably because of the temporary incentives it’s pushing (a hustling new employee could score an extra $15,000 in bonuses within a short time). It’s reduced its overall vacancy rate to 19 percent (from 25 percent a year ago). But it’s too early to tell whether that strategy will slow the turnover. Of all the data available on the hiring problems, one statistic stands out: The retention rate has remained stubbornly low. Barely half of the new hires who signed up in early 2022 were still on the job a year later. The miserable retention rate is a strong indication that higher pay by itself won’t solve the problem, says Christie Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, which released a report on the CDOC staffi ng crisis last spring. “This isn’t something you just throw money at,” she ob- serves. “I think, fundamentally, the workforce has changed. For a lot of people, this is not a career. They get burned out. It’s a tough job.” Several retired CDOC employees inter- viewed by Westword were sharply critical of the department’s leadership, suggesting that administrative decisions have made a tough job even tougher. Shifting priorities as the state has emerged in the vanguard of a national prison reform movement have left many old-school offi cers feeling left behind — and locked in a kind of culture war with new-school bosses and unprepared new hires. Prisoners, too, worry that the staff shortage is eroding the reforms of recent years, shutting down worthwhile programs and putting manipulative inmates, including gang leaders, in charge of others. They also say that some of the steps the CDOC is taking to hire more bodies are actually making the prisons less safe. More than three years after the pandemic hit, “nothing is back to normal,” reports one resident of the Sterling Correctional Facil- ity, the state’s largest prison. “Teachers are still being used as [corrections offi cers], and inmates get penalized for not taking required but unavailable classes and are forced to stay in prison that much longer. You have new people showing newer people what to do, when they don’t fully understand the job themselves. There are many times when the most senior offi cer in the immediate area has not been employed here even a year.” Get a Job It wasn’t so long ago that a job in correc- tions in Colorado was widely regarded as a ticket to the middle class. The CDOC was the highest-paying employer available in several rural areas, including Limon, Sterling and Ordway, and it wasn’t unusual to fi nd two or three generations of a family working in the seven prisons that are part of the Cañon City complex. In the 1990s, the drive to adopt profes- sional standards across the industry, in- cluding an insistence that front-line staff be referred to as “offi cers” rather than “guards,” helped dispel long-simmering stereotypes of sadistic turnkeys; many employees who’d joined while waiting to fi nd something better in another branch of law enforcement ended up staying twenty years or more. Longtimers helped perpetuate a paramili- tary mindset among corrections offi cers that had sharp boundaries, especially where in- mates were concerned. Offi cers didn’t shake hands with inmates. They didn’t disclose their fi rst names or any personal informa- tion, to avoid being compromised. They didn’t get involved in inmate drama. They had a set of rules, written and otherwise, and so did the inmates. But the established order began to crum- ble a decade ago, in the wake of a tragedy that shook the CDOC to its core: the 2013 murder of its executive director, Tom Clements, by parole absconder Evan Ebel, who’d been released from solitary confi nement to the street just seven weeks earlier. Investigators disagreed about whether the killing was a lone-wolf act of vengeance or a hit ordered by a white supremacist prison gang. Ebel, who’d also killed pizza delivery driver Na- than Leon and was soon killed himself in a shootout with Texas authorities, left behind a recorded message describing himself as the Frankenstein monster of a prison system that “wanted to play the mad scientist.” Clements had been working to reduce Colorado’s reliance on solitary confi nement to manage its most problematic prisoners, which he regarded as excessive. His succes- sors took up that cause, focusing on getting mentally ill inmates out of isolation and improving re-entry programs. The reforms drew national attention, even though the CDOC’s recidivism rate remained conspicu- ously high (half of its prisoners are back behind bars within three years after release). Yet the upheaval had other, far-reaching im- pacts beyond the numbers; for one thing, the new approach emphasized “empowering” inmates and encouraging the creation of inmate-led peer counseling and rehabilita- tive programs, a move that many veteran offi cers viewed with skepticism and hostility. As some saw it, the infl ux of new ini- tiatives was an attack on the traditional hierarchy in prisons. Wardens were inviting inmates to call them by their fi rst name while ignoring staff concerns about being out- numbered, stretched thin and disrespected. “Any kind of change is diffi cult, whether you’re an inmate or a staff member,” says Allen Harms, a former captain who retired from the CDOC after a 22-year career. “But there wasn’t any clear guidance. It got to the point where inmates were doing staff work, and staff were feeling unappreciated.” “They started putting inmates ahead of staff,” says John Walravens, who retired in 2021 after seventeen years. “I don’t think they want it to be a career path anymore. They have rules and regs that the staff have to follow, but they don’t make inmates follow them.” Harms and Walravens both worked at the Sterling prison, and say it wasn’t simply the staffi ng shortage that prompted them to retire. Walravens disagreed with the new regime’s lenient handling of drug and assault cases and the shutdown of vocational classes at Sterling that taught inmates employable trades such as welding and carpentry, he says. Harms decided to leave after drafting a proposal to get the prison’s religious programs running again after the pandemic. “I wrote it, looked at it, and said, ‘This is not safe,’” he recalls. Both men say the CDOC’s bonuses and other incentives for new hires were part of the problem. Veteran offi cers were expected to provide on-the-job training for recent ar- rivals who were making more money than they were, breeding resentment. “When a brand-new lieutenant can get promoted over a seasoned lieutenant, it’s tough,” Walravens says. “Why would I want to help a new lieutenant who’s making more money than I do?” Other former employees talk about a downward spiral in the department that was made worse by the use of mandatory overtime to fi ll slots that had gone vacant; then more offi cers would leave, increasing the load for those who remained. While some offi cers welcomed the idea of boosting their pay by working back-to-back eight-hour shifts, oth- ers saw it as a recipe for disaster. Anonymous reviews of the CDOC on the Indeed job web- site teem with warnings about “ridiculous” hours and the lack of a “work-life balance.” The overtime has also been linked to at least three serious car crashes on the state’s roads in 2022, involving CDOC employees who may have fallen asleep at the wheel during long commutes home after pulling extra shifts. Two of the crashes were fatal; the third left a twenty-year-old employee paralyzed. Last spring, the department reached an agreement with the union that limits the use of overtime; among other provisions, it requires that an employee have at least ten hours of rest after working fourteen hours or more in a single day. The CDOC has also gone from three eight-hour shifts to two twelve-hour shifts per day, but opinion is divided as to whether the new schedule is much of an improvement. Despite working only four days a week, couples working op- posite shifts may see The Hard Cell continued from page 7 continued on page 10 Hilary Glasgow, executive director of the state employees union Colorado WINS, believes the prison system is facing “a time of reckoning.” COLORADOWINS.ORG
