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| lorida struggles to keep corrections officers in state prisons |
| By marketplace.org - Alisa Roth |
| Published: 09/02/2016 |
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Three years ago, Lisa Murray quit her job as a corrections officer in a Florida state prison, to take a new job as a corrections officer at a county jail. It was a lower ranked position—she had been a lieutenant, and went back to being an unranked officer—but it paid a lot more. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the old job, she just couldn’t afford to keep it. “To be honest,” she said, sitting outside the county jail where she currently works. “I was close to losing my house. There were times that I couldn’t afford to put food in my refrigerator.” Murray is hardly alone. Hours for corrections officers are long, and pay is low. And despite falling prison populations in a lot of states, there’s a shortage of corrections officers just about everywhere. It’s especially dire in Florida, though, which has one of the biggest prison populations in the country and some of the lowest starting salaries of any state. Murray says that by the second year in her new job, she had nearly doubled her old salary, even though her job supervising inmates was essentially the same. One difference: the hours. “I always worked days when I was with the state cause I had seniority,” she said. “But coming here, since I have no seniority, I’m on nights.” Read More. |
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