Pressure to raise salaries for county jailers

Competition is driving up labor costs at county jails as well as state prisons. In the next budget cycle,  according to the Abilene Reporter-News, Taylor County commissioners will likely boost jailers' pay to attract more applicants for entry-level guard spots:

Those in the county’s “public safety” matrix whose current salary is less than $30,000 will be brought up to that amount.

The decision, primarily designed to both attract new employees to the jail and help with retention of those already employed, will draw from unspent salary and — if needed — contingency funds.

“We’re having trouble retaining people because they’re going elsewhere for higher salaries,” said Sheriff Ricky Bishop after the meeting, who said he hoped that the increase would make a difference in both retention and hiring.

The starting salary for a new jailer was $27,000, a recent salary increase over the $25,300 previously paid. Commissioners said Tuesday that $30,250 is the average salary for a jailer in four counties — Tom Green, Lubbock, Brazos and Wichita — comparable to Taylor.

Chief Jail Administrator Terrie Noret told commissioners Tuesday that the jail is down 15 employees, with two set to transfer to the Taylor County Sheriff’s Department. Employees typically work in the jail before taking on patrol duties.

So if the county is lucky, higher wages will help them fill 15 positions that presently aren't drawing a salary, adding half a million or so to Taylor's jail budget. Don't hire them, and you rack up overtime while contributed to low morale and a dispirited, overworked staff. It's a less-government conservative's nightmare.

Budget crises create problems, opportunities for counties on juvenile justice

A couple of juvie justice stories related to county budgets caught my eye recently that may interest Grits readers. First, Taylor County (Abilene) is experiencing 50+% turnover in juvenile detention staff, apparently because of low pay, according to the Abilene Reporter-News:

To Deputy Chief Larry Jones, the news that Taylor County trails in its pay for juvenile probation and detention personnel isn't shocking.

"We hire a lot of people — we have over 50 percent turnover in detention officers," said Jones, who now oversees fiscal services. "Part of what's reflected, I believe, is due to some lower salaries."

An analysis of salary data by the Reporter-News found that Taylor County paid its juvenile detention staff the least out of a comparison that included Midland, Wichita and Tom Green counties, while payment for juvenile probation personnel was last.

That's a problem, Jones said, because the county wants the best possible personnel to work with such children, who are often "abused, neglected and thrown away."

Meanwhile, Calhoun County is closing a "boot camp" for juveniles because of a budget shortfall, reports the Victoria Advocate, but in this case that may be a good thing. Juvie boot camps were a fad in the '90s, but with the rise of evidence-based practices in juvenile justice settings, they've consistently been categorized among approaches that don't actually achieve measurable, positive results (pdf) and in many cases have resulted in physical abuse and even death (pdf). Budget cuts aren't always a bad thing because they force government to set priorities and make hard choices that wouldn't be politically palatable in economic good times. The opportunity to eliminate programming that may sound good to the tuff-on-crime crowd but fails to achieve promised results is a silver lining to the dark budget cloud hanging over Texas counties.

Did you visit your client in jail, yet?

At a truly excellent conference this week sponsored by the Texas Task Force on Indigent Defense, the indigent defense coordinator in Taylor County gave a description of the processes they use to ensure attorneys are promptly appointed for people in jail.

As mentioned earlier, the Supreme Court's Rothgery case now requires counties to provide lawyers to indigent defendants out on bond and many counties have not upgraded their indigent defense plans to accommodate that change. But processes for appointing lawyers for people in jail have problems too, and for those folks, Taylor County seems to have a good accountability system in place that goes beyond what most counties are doing.

Jennifer DeLeon Griffin, the Taylor indigent defense coordinator, pro-actively reviews the list of jail inmates who've not bonded out and do not have an attorney (if they have one, she emails the lawyer to let them know their client is back in jail). Then she visits the jail twice weekly to record requests for an attorney and gets them appointed ASAP. That's a pretty pro-active approach - lots of other counties just have requests go through the jailers which can cause unnecessary delay.

After counsel is appointed, Griffin periodically checks jail visitation records to find out if the lawyer has visited their client, which is supposed to happen according to county rules within five days. If the attorney hasn't visited, she contacts them with a reminder. If a second reminder is required, she also sends a copy to the judge so the lawyer knows the judge is aware of their delay. If that doesn't do the trick, she gets the judge to personally call the attorney telling them to follow up.

Griffin also created a county "complaint of attorney conduct" form for defendants to fill out if they're unhappy with their representation,, and those complaints are computerized so each judge can pull up all of a given attorney's complaints. Their county plan has a periodic review process for attorneys where judges look at complaints, non-compliance with attorney visits, etc., and make a decision whether to remove those who're not up to snuff.

Speaking of which, I heard a couple of interesting discussions at the event of processes for removing bad attorneys from the appointment list. The court administrator from Travis said their judges annually vet the list together and may decide to remove an attorney altogether, downgrade others to lower-level cases, and in some instances giving a reprimand/warning in lieu of removal. In some cases, judges told attorneys they needed to get a mentor to continue receiving appointments.

The first time Travis judges vetted the appointment list several years ago, targeted lawyers reacted with a howl of protest. In some instances their caseload was 100% appointed cases, so removing them from the list was essentially firing them as a lawyer and some were quite upset. As a result of that initial backlash, now when Travis removes somebody a county staffer meets with them to explain the judges' reasons and tell them what they need to do to regain their appointment status. By contrast, some counties just send them a form letter saying "you're off."

The Taylor County coordinator deserves a lot of credit for being proactive to ensure prompt appointment of counsel and that lawyers are visiting their clients. I'd definitely like to see other counties mimic her methods, and similar accountability protocols need to be developed after Rothgery to oversee appointed counsel for people who've bonded out.