Arkansas Department of Corrections set to spend up to $5.2M on overtime pay, pending final approval

The agency overseeing Arkansas prisons expects to spend $5.2 million in overtime pay for correctional officers in the next six months, Department of Corrections officials told a legislative panel Tuesday.

The Arkansas Legislative Council will take up the department’s spending authority request Friday for final approval after the Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review subcommittee approved it Tuesday.

Several facilities under the department’s Division of Corrections are “very short-staffed,” division director Dexter Payne told the subcommittee. For example, the medium-security Tucker Unit in northern Jefferson County is operating with just over half its allotted staff at the moment, requiring overtime pay for staff to cover shifts, he said.

The $5.2 million for overtime will come from the department’s salary savings and should be enough for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends June 30, 2025, department chief financial officer Chad Brown said. The department often pays $1.3 million to $1.5 million per month in overtime, he said.

Axios NW Arkansas reported Tuesday that the Tucker Unit has 5.6 inmates for each correctional officer. That wasn’t the highest prisoner-to-guard ratio, according to Axios. The East Arkansas Regional Unit in Marianna and the Cummins and Varner/Supermax units, both in Gould, had ratios of 7.9, 7.7, and 6.5, respectively.

Arkansas state employee pay plan overhaul boosts salaries for hard-to-fill jobs

“We’ve had one month where we paid $2 million in overtime, but it looks like it’s trending back down,” Brown said.

The corrections department has been one of the most difficult state agencies to maintain adequate staffing, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in November when she announced a restructure of the state’s employee pay plan.

Under her proposed plan, which requires legislative approval, correctional officers’ average entry-level salaries will increase from $37,589 to $50,845, and their average salaries will increase from $50,461 to $59,100. Implementing pay raises in several departments should make employees’ salaries competitive with the private sector and improve staff retention rates, Sanders said.

Employees at the Tucker Unit, one of the most understaffed correctional facilities, make roughly $42,000 per year, Payne told the committee. He said he believes the pay plan restructure will help recruit new employees.

Sen. Linda Chesterfield, D-Little Rock, said she hoped Payne was correct because “we can’t continue to sustain this overtime.”

In addition to the Division of Correction’s two dozen facilities, the department has six residential Community Correction Centers. Payne told the state Board of Corrections earlier this month that lengthening employees’ shifts from eight to 12 hours would help alleviate staffing shortages at those facilities.

Extending shifts would not only reduce the need to hire more staff, but would also ensure enough around-the-clock supervision to allow more inmates to be moved from county jails to the state-run centers, Payne told the board. The state typically spends roughly $30 million a year to house thousands of inmates in county facilities.

Payne said that number was 2,046 as of Dec. 2 and could be reduced to below 2,000 by Jan. 1 by implementing longer shifts.