I have to say that I don’t understand the outrage generated by this story about California prison guards earning massive amounts of overtime.  I guess it ties into the conservative culture of victimhood and the belief that someone’s always scheming to steal from them.

Here’s the deal.  Prison guards are getting a lot of overtime because they’re working a ton of hours.  Overtime is DESIGNED to increase exponentially with more hours worked.  The reason they’re working so much is that, a) inmates are stuffed into common areas where they need to be watched more closely than if they were all locked away in cells, and b) there aren’t enough guards for this extra workload.  The overtime isn’t “out of control,” as the President of the astroturf-like “National Tax Limitation Committee” said in the article; the prison system is out of control.  Would you rather there be no guards?  Would you rather everyone worked 40 hours a week and there was nobody on the job in common areas at night?

more on the flip…

The director of prisons is exactly right.

While relatively few officers are required to guard inmates housed in cells, far more are needed to watch those housed in gymnasiums and other areas not meant for sleeping, said Scott Kernan, acting director of adult prisons.

“Population is the biggest driving force” in the soaring overtime, Kernan said.

Corrections officers have a difficult job, made all the more difficult by overcrowding, gang warfare, a complete lack of health care which angers the prison population, and having to work all this overtime, which wears on anyone.  This isn’t a case of lucky-duckies living off the fat of the taxpayer.  There aren’t enough corrections officers, bottom line.  And if you want to blame somebody, blame whatever idiot thought this was a good idea:

(executive vice president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. Chuck) Alexander said the state could reduce overtime by hiring as many as 4,000 people to fill vacancies.

He blamed the guard shortage on a decision to shut the academy for new recruits for eight months in 2004.

At that time, the prison population had dipped, and some officials believed the decline would continue.

The drop turned out to be temporary.

Attorney Don Specter, director of the Prison Law Office, which is suing the state over prison crowding, agreed that the decision to shut the academy was a “mistake.”

“They don’t have enough officers to safely man the prisons,” Specter said.

I guarantee you that the Governor’s office was responsible for that stupidity.  “Hey, the population dipped for one year, let’s close the academy down!”  Brilliant!  It cuts costs, and fits a pattern of wishes turning into policy.  If we just BELIEVE that the prison population will go down some more, surely it will, right?

Meanwhile, the LA Times article from which this all comes flat-out lied about the Governor’s new plan, saying it focuses equally on building new facilities, rehabilitation and changing sentencing guidelines, while most of the money goes to building, little to rehab, and the only sentencing guidelines that will be reviewed in the first year will be parole sentences.

Gray Davis gave a very bloated contract to the prison guards’ union in exchange for campaign support, the results of which are being felt now.  Indeed it looks clear that Governor Schwarzenegger gave in to the guards’ union on whatever they wanted in an election year, and that wasn’t even enough to earn their support.  But let’s not demonize the corrections officers themselves for having to deal with a crisis that is not of their own design.