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| Calif. prison hiring defied budget |
| By Mercury News Sacramento Bureau |
| Published: 02/16/2004 |
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During the past three years, California's troubled prison system hired 1,000 officers at a cost of up to $100 million and without permission from the Legislature, state finance officials revealed last Wednesday. "It makes the budget process look really very bogus," said Sen. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, after hearing testimony from the Schwarzenegger administration about the unauthorized workers whose salaries have contributed to the skyrocketing costs in the nation's largest prison system. In fact, the non-partisan Legislative Analyst's Office told lawmakers that the Department of Corrections budget in recent years grew at a faster rate than the inmate population. During the past decade the budget has doubled, to about $6 billion, while the number of inmates has risen only 23 percent, to roughly 160,000. The latest disclosures left even veteran lawmakers scratching their heads about the validity of budget figures from the Department of Corrections, which for years has been forced to seek hundreds of millions in extra funds because of cost overruns. And it left them questioning how the department -- saddled with a lucrative labor contract for prison officers -- could ever live within its spending plan. Officials in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Department of Finance said the employees had been hired without permission, and that they are attempting to figure out whether it was done by wardens or other prison officials and what exactly the employees are doing. The Finance Department has determined that in the last three years of the Davis administration, officials had failed to reconcile the budget with authorized positions such as guard-tower staffing and other posts. Rick Rimmer, acting director of corrections, said the mystery of the unauthorized workers was discovered within the past couple of months. He identified them as correctional officers and estimated their cost to taxpayers at $80 million to $100 million a year. |
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