The two following
letters were written by Brent McCall, co-author along with Michael Liebowitz of
“Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Cultureof Corrections Encourages Crime.” Both concern what prisoners in New York
call “clocksuckers,” prison employees who engage in stretching their paychecks
at the expense of taxpayers.
When Does Government Management Become A Crime?
You’ve probably heard that Connecticut’s prison population
is the lowest it has been in 30 years. Much less touted by the powers that be
is that staffing levels within the Department of Corrections (DOC) remain at
record highs. There are currently somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,000 Corrections
employees guarding less than 9,000 prisoners, And at a cost of more than half
as billion dollars a year to run the state’s prison system, it’s hard to
imagine how such staffing levels may be justified. Even when they cannot be
justified, DOC employees readily conspire to make it look like they can.
This occurred recently
in the carpentry class at Cheshire Correctional Institution when, for
reasons not entirely clear to me, Mr. Toth, the carpentry teacher who used to
work at York Correctional Institution, was transferred here. The story Mr. Toth
tells is that the DOC defunded the carpentry program he taught at York. The
thing is, however, it has not funded a program for him here at Cheshire.
Since Cheshire CI already has a carpentry teacher, Mr. Toth,
for the first several months he was here, would just come into work and hang
out in an empty room all day with nothing to do. Recently, however, there have
been efforts by several staff members here to make it look like Mr. Toth’s
services continue to be needed.
For example, On February 4th the inmates of the
existing carpentry class, myself included, were told that the class roster
would be split in two in order to provide “justification,” their word, not mine, for Mr. Toth being here. We
were also told at the time that although Mr. Toth could answer student
questions, he would be unable to run a class on his own because he would not
have access to the tool crib. And it didn’t take long for his so called “students”
to learn what that meant.
On March 6, the original carpentry teacher was absent from
his work. Despite this, Mr. Toth came into the housing unit to collect “his
students.” Before leaving the unit, he got six of us together and told us that
we would be going out to the shop, but that he wouldn’t be able to actually do
anything because he didn’t have the keys to the crib or the office.
He further stated that he was only “going through the
motions” because he had to “justify” his being here. And, sure enough, he wasn’t
even able to provide as much as a single pencil for the six of us to share. Our
sole purpose in being there was to help him bilk the taxpayers of Connecticut
out of another day’s pay and benefits, something he had been doing, with the
apparent blessing of his superiors, for more than six months.
Not only does this scheme violate at least a dozen
departmental directives, it also violates the law, because documents were
fabricated in order to create the illusion that Mr. Toth actually has students
and therefore duties to perform. The split roster may be the tip of a larger
iceberg, and while I’ll spare you the legalese, this type of document
fabrication is clearly identified as second degree forgery by Connecticut
General Statutes (#53a-139); and, of course, to the extent that employees of
the DOC had agreed to create this illusion, conspiracy as well (#53a-48).
According to the General Statutes, second degree forgery and conspiracy to
commit forgery are both class D felonies, each punishable by up to five years in
prison. Also, prisoners are conscripted into an unwitting co-conspiracy.
This brings us back to by original question: When does
government mismanagement become a crime?
There are undoubtedly a number of ways this could be
answered. But surely I have presented one of them here; which is to say, when
state employees conspire to create “official” documents in an effort to protect
a co-worker’s employment. That, I am afraid, is fraud. And if we allow the
employees of any state agency to do such things with impunity, there really is
no limit to the financial abuses they can perpetuate.
What Can Be Done With The Clocksuckers
Abusers of the Department of Corrections overtime policy in
New York State are known throughout the prison population as “clocksuckers.”
Indeed, abuse of overtime within the Connecticut Department
of Corrections (CDOC) has been glaringly widespread for years. Year in and year
out, the CDOC consistently has the highest overtime expenditures of any state
agency.
In the two years prior to the Coronavirus pandemic, for
instance, the CDOC spent nearly $80 million on overtime, with 2019’s
expenditures exceeding 2018’s by several millions; this during a period of time
when the overall workforce increased while the prisoner population actually
decreased.
The simple fact is Connecticut’s taxpayers spend tens of
millions annually funding overtime for prison guards who have no legitimate
reason to be working overtime. And the thing is – everyone in the department,
from the commissioner on down, knows it.
The scheme works like this: The contract the state has with
the Corrections unit dictates that prison guards be paid time and a half after
working eight hours – rather than forty hours. This has led to a culture of
corruption wherein officers routinely trade shifts with one another in a way
that allows each of them to work as many doubles as they like. Rather than
earning straight pay for their scheduled hours, prison guards are able to pad
their paychecks – by as much as 50% or more – merely by taking advantage of the
department’s over-generous overtime policy. And since CDOC retirement benefits
are tied directly to an employee’s highest earning years, the graft continues
to pay dividends long after one’s employment with the department has ended.
It’s clear this practice violates the law, even if authorities
refuse to recognize it as such. After all, we are ultimately talking about
individuals committing fraud for financial gain.
The fact that the union contract permits time and a half
after eight hours in no way excuses or justifies the abusive practices in which
so many CDOC employees engage. But even if an argument could be made that
prison officials shouldn’t report the overtime abusers to law enforcement for
arrest and prosecution, it’s hard to understand why they refuse to enforce the department’s
own policies regarding the issue.
Although the CDOC Administrative Directives do not expressly
prohibit abuse of overtime, there are several directives that implicitly
prohibit the practice. For example, the CDOC’s Code of Employee conduct prohibits
personnel from “Engaging in unprofessional or illegal behavior… that could
reflect negatively on the Department…” (A.D. 2l.17~ (5)(b)12). Clearly, staff
manipulating overtime policy to the detriment of taxpayers reflects negatively
on the department. I know it does this with the inmate population. And I
imagine it would with the public too, if the public wasn’t kept in the dark
about it.
The CDOC Code of Ethics prohibits staff from engaging in “Any
financial interest… which ‘substantially conflicts’ with… the public interest
(A.D. 1.13 ~ (4)(B)(1).”
If prison guards fleecing the taxpayers of Connecticut out
of millions of dollars a year through what amounts to nothing less than a
contractual sleight of hand doesn’t “substantially conflict” with the public
interest, then I don’t know what would.
The Directive which mandates that employees “Promptly report
any corrupt, illegal, unauthorized, or unethical behavior (A.D. 1.13~(4)(A)(7)”
has proven entirely ineffective at putting a stop to overtime abuses. But I
suppose that’s not all that surprising: co-conspirators rarely roll over on
each other without a credible threat of punishment.
If you ask me, the solution to the widespread abuse of
overtime by CDOC personnel is pretty simple. Even if prison officials refuse to
report the culprits to law enforcement, they should at least move to fire the
clocksuckers.
Brent McCall #218615
Cheshire Correctional Institution
900 Highland Ave
Cheshire CT
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