Lincoln Hills teen prison plagued with staff shortage

MADISON – Officials are wrestling with a massive staff shortage at Wisconsin’s juvenile prison complex, with no one available to fill more than a quarter of the jobs there.

As a result, guards are forced to work long hours and operate with skeleton crews to keep the troubled Lincoln Hills School for Boys operating 24 hours a day. The staff shortage adds to the challenges at a facility that is facing multiple lawsuits and a criminal investigation over the treatment of teen inmates.

Sixty-seven of 313 jobs are unfilled at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake School for Girls, which sits on the same campus 30 miles north of Wausau. In addition, 26 prison employees can’t work because they are on leave for injuries or other reasons.

In all, that means there are no employees available for 93 jobs.

Twenty-one of those jobs are not filled because the positions were not created until Gov. Scott Walker signed the state budget in September.

The other openings are emblematic of a long-running staff shortage at Lincoln Hills and other Wisconsin prisons. Corrections officials have had trouble recruiting and retaining employees, especially at a time when unemployment is low and correctional officers make a starting wage of $16 an hour.

Because of the staff shortage, employees are forced to frequently work 16hour shifts, sometimes with little notice. Those long hours contribute to workers quitting — exacerbating the problem.

“People are scrambling up there,” said Doug Curtis, a retired guard. “Everybody’s walking around like zombies” because of all the overtime.

Department of Corrections spokesman Tristan Cook said the agency is working hard to fill all the jobs at Lincoln Hills, including the newly created ones. He said it wasn’t fair to include 21 of the vacant jobs because they were newly

created and the Department of Corrections hasn’t had a chance to fill them yet.

“We will not rest until all open positions are filled,” he said in a statement.

Workers at Lincoln Hills and other institutions got 80-cent-an-hour raises in 2016, shortly after Corrections Secretary Jon Litscher came onto the job.

Cook noted that guards, or youth counselors as they are called at Lincoln Hills, receive raises that bring their pay to about $16.50 after six months, about $17 after a year, about $17.50 after 18 months and about $18 after 24 months. They make one and a half times their regular pay for overtime.

But those at Lincoln Hills say more is needed to fill jobs at the juvenile prison complex.

Guard Julie Giers said it would “absolutely help” if Lincoln Hills workers had the full-fledged collective bargaining powers they lost under Act 10, the law Gov. Scott Walker signed in 2011 that greatly reduced the power of unions for most public workers in Wisconsin.

“I don’t care about the pay,” Giers said recently. “What I care about is this past week I worked 72 hours in a six-day stretch.”

Hunting season and Thanksgiving add to the strain. Workers use their vacation this time of year, which means others have to be called in on overtime shifts to fill those jobs.

There are openings for a wide range of jobs at the facility. Prison officials are seeking to hire 36 guards while also looking for a new superintendent to run the prison. Others at the prison educate inmates, provide them medical care and take care of administrative matters.

The criminal investigation of Lincoln Hills began in January 2015. This summer, in response to a class-action lawsuit brought by inmates, a federal judge ordered the prison to curb the use of pepper spray and solitary confinement.

Workers contend that has led to a more volatile environment that has left them fearing for their lives. Attorneys for the inmates say serious injuries have not increased since the order was issued and any problems are the fault of prison administrators and not the order itself.

“Until the administration addresses the glaring staffing issues caused by unsafe work conditions and low pay, this crisis is going to continue,” said a recent statement from Rick Badger, executive director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees-Wisconsin, which represents workers there.

In response, Cook said the department has been proactive in addressing problems at Lincoln Hills.

“We acknowledge that a career in corrections is challenging, which is why the department has made significant investments over the prior few years to bolster security in a number of areas at (Lincoln Hills),” Cook said in his statement.

Records show Lincoln Hills has had between 30 and 67 unfilled jobs each month this year. The figure has hovered in the 40s most months, but jumped to 67 this month because of the new jobs that were approved as part of the state budget.

Those figures do not include employees who are unable to work because they are on leave. As of last week there were 26 people on leave, down from 31 last month, according to the Department of Corrections.