New hires keeping pace with separations
BY DAN HILDEBRAN
Monitor Editor
TALLAHASSEE— Florida’s Secretary of Corrections told a Senate committee last week that for the first time in over a year, more people were hired in the department’s Region 1 than employees who retired or resigned from the region’s facilities. Region 1 covers the panhandle.
Ricky Dixon added that statewide during December the nation’s third-largest prison system only lost six more officers than it hired, virtually breaking even for the first time in over a year.
The secretary credited new bonuses and raises the department implemented in December for the turnaround.
“We raised the salaries just before Christmas,” he said. “We provided retention bonuses and increased sign-on bonuses, so we’ve seen a significant impact.”
Dixon said the raises positioned the state to compete more favorably against county jails for correctional officers, lifting FDC’s pay from the bottom third of Florida’s county jails to the top third.
“We’ll always have trouble competing with some of the larger counties, but that’s the place we need to stay,” he said of FDC’s pay, as compared to county jails.
Dixon also told the Senate’s Criminal Justice Committee that over the past year the department has shuttered 203 dorms, suspended 431 work squads and closed 28 work camps and five community release centers to consolidate its facilities and lessen the impact of its shortage of correctional officers.
The department’s vacancy rate for correctional officers hit a new peak in December with 31.93% of jobs going unfilled. However, Dixon said he believed the trend will start to reverse soon.
“Going back over a decade, he told senators, we were running around nine and 10 percent,” he said of FDC’s officer vacancy rate. “To safely operate a prison system, we should be around a three percent vacancy rate.”
