King County Jail Corrections Officers Worked More Than 188,000 Hours of Overtime Last Year

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Corrections officers at King County jails worked more than 188,000 hours of overtime last year, continuing a yearslong trend that has cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars and now, according to union officials, has reached a crisis that threatens the safety of guards and inmates alike.

“If something meaningful isn’t done to relieve this situation soon,” David Richardson, president of the King County Corrections Guild, wrote to county leaders in September, “our workforce is going to start to break.”

For some officers, overtime is voluntary and can add thousands of dollars to their take-home pay. For others, it means long hours ordered by their boss and personal cost, like exhaustion and loss of time with family.

Extensive use of overtime is an open secret inside the King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention (DAJD), where county records show officers and sergeants at the downtown jail, the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent and the juvenile jail in Seattle have worked nearly a million hours of overtime since 2013, at a cost of $52.8 million.

About 15 percent of those overtime hours were mandatory — meaning supervisors, after not finding enough volunteers, require officers to come in early or stay late. Officers working overtime earn time-and-a-half their regular pay. And at the adult jails, officers make twice their regular pay if they work mandatory overtime more than once in a 10-day period. In lieu of overtime pay, workers can take compensatory hours off — “comp time.”

County leaders say they have been able to cover millions of dollars in overtime costs in the department’s existing budget and they’re working to hire more officers to reduce the strain of constant overtime. The county recently began offering hiring incentives of up to $10,000 for corrections officers.

But the county blames the workers, too, saying officers take large amounts of leave, sometimes with little advance notice, forcing them to fill those positions with overtime hours.

In a statement, County Executive Dow Constantine said the county was working to address the problem but also blamed “substantial use and abuse of leave,” plus limits on which officers can work mandatory overtime, and unpredictable schedules.

The county’s contracts with the unions representing corrections officers limit how many officers can be out on vacation at any one time. But the county argues that overtime can pile up as it attempts to fill those spots, along with those of officers on leave or out due to illness or injury.

The King County Corrections Guild represents officers and sergeants who work at adult jails; the King County Juvenile Detention Guild represents officers who work at the juvenile jail. The county is now in arbitration with the King County Corrections Guild. Those officers currently work under a contract that expired at the end of 2016.

The county and guild are in arbitration for the fourth time in 10 years with “chronic impasses,” Constantine said. “The status quo provisions of the Guild’s contract are not solving the problem; they are part of the problem. They do not benefit employees, taxpayers, or the public we serve.”

The unions representing officers, meantime, accuse county officials of having failed to take seriously a problem that has festered for decades.

Jail guards are “trying to push a big boulder up the hill but have only got four or five small people to do it,” Richardson said in an interview. “We just don’t have enough labor to do the amount of work they are making us do.”

Problem Unsolved for Decades

Richardson’s warning that the jail workforce would “break” may have put the issue in stark new terms, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone in King County government.

Since nearly the day the King County Jail opened in 1986, overtime has been a concern, according to media coverage from the time and several King County Auditor studies of the issue over the last two decades.

That spring, overtime costs at the downtown jail threatened to throw the county budget off by as much as $1 million, The Seattle Times reported. A union representative said the jail was understaffed; County Council members suggested schedule changes. Officials placed blame on a higher-than-predicted jail population and on operating two jails as inmates were transported from the old facility to the new one.

By the end of the year, jail staffers had taken a vote of “no confidence” in the county executive and County Council. Saying conditions were becoming more dangerous, employees planned a work slowdown. In the mid-’90s, the issue persisted. As some guards earned enough overtime to double their regular pay, authorities blamed jail overcrowding.

In 2009, an arbitrator considering disputes between the county and the corrections-officers guild called the county’s use of mandatory overtime “inhumane” and “cruel.”

“What public observer in a King County courtroom would fail to be outraged to find that the armed Corrections Officer responsible for the security of a potentially violent prisoner was functioning on four or five hours’ sleep in the last 28 hours?” wrote arbitrator Howell Lankford.

By 2013, the county spent about $6.6 million on overtime at adult and juvenile jails, according to data obtained by The Seattle Times through a public-disclosure request.