EDITORIAL BOARD
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
In a state agency that employs more than 38,000 people, some bad apples are bound to turn up, but the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has more than its share of them. Particularly alarming was the hiring five years ago of one of the Ku Klux Klan's top leaders to work as a prison guard in Texas.
As the American-Statesman's Mike Ward reported in Sunday's editions, the situation reached a crisis level in recent weeks, during which almost two dozen correctional employees were arrested on an assortment of felony and misdemeanor charges. During the past five weeks, the prison system's former gang enforcement chief pleaded guilty to sexually harassing employees; the personnel chief of the prison school system was arrested after being accused of lewd conduct at a park in Conroe and a human resource official was sought as a fugitive after being charged in the death of two pedestrians in what police say was a drunken driving hit-and-run.
In all, 148 arrests of employees have been logged during the first two months of 2006, Ward reported. If the trend continues, it would set a record. Last year, state records show that 761 prison employees were arrested, about 1 in 51. That arrest rate is higher than the arrest rates of prison employees in other states.
It's not a mystery why Texas is attracting so many law-breaking corrections employees. We're getting what we're paying for. Texas ranks near the bottom 47th among the 50 states in correctional salaries. Starting pay for a prison guard is $22,000 a year. Compare that to the $44,570 annual pay of starting Austin police officers. Qualifications for the jobs are different, but neither requires a college degree.
Texas prison officials can't be choosy at that pay. The turnover rate is about 500 people a month and demand far outpaces supply. In March, the agency hired 514 correctional officers but still needed another 2,616 people to fill positions. Another problem might be that standards for the job might be set too low. Raising standards without raising pay, however, would further decrease the pool of applicants.
The best way to approach the problem is to increase the pay and the standards to attract better candidates. The majority of prison employees are law-abiding folks. But it will be hard to retain them unless something is done to improve their salaries.
Technology has also proved to be part of the answer. Prison officials told the American-Statesman that they increasingly rely on hidden cameras to catch bad actors. Those surveillance cameras have caught prison employees engaged in embarrassing and unethical behavior, including having sex with an inmate and slugging one of their own prison guards in an attempted cover-up for an unauthorized use of force against an inmate. (The guard who was slugged by a colleague then would claim his bruises came from being hit by an inmate.)
The increasing number of arrests of prison system correctional guards seems to track legislative spending trends. Three years after the Legislature slashed its budget to save money and help balance the entire state budget during lean years, the prison system is working with fewer resources. But the state economy has since rebounded and produced an estimated $8.2 billion surplus.
The next legislative session in 2007 would be a good time for lawmakers to improve the hiring system for the state's prisons. This is not a problem that anyone should ignore. The reason we lock people up in the first place is to protect the public from crime and violence as well as to punish the perpetrators.
There is a real danger to our security when those who are guarding the criminals are breaking the law.
