The worker who out-earned almost every rank-and-file employee in the Illinois prison system in 2014 was not a corrections officer, administrator or counselor. It was a nurse who more than doubled her annual income working overtime at the Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet.
The Stateville nurse, Loreatha Coleman, earned more than $184,000, including almost $100,000 in overtime pay, in the state's fiscal year that ended last June.
She's hardly alone.
While Gov. Bruce Rauner this month promised to hire more prison guards, citing "an unsafe environment" in one of the country's largest prison systems, across-the-board understaffing cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years.
The Illinois Department of Corrections forked over $320 million in employee overtime and compensatory payments over a five-year period, a BGA Rescuing Illinois investigation found.
The annual payouts are among the largest of any state agency. The cumulative figure is almost twice as much paid during the same period to employees of the Illinois Department of Transportation, an agency that drew criticism in a state audit for excessive overtime in recent years.
Officials with the state's largest public employee union, sympathetic politicians and prison reform advocates see excessive overtime as symptomatic of dangerous under-staffing while corrections officials argued for years that it's an unwelcome, but manageable, strain on the system. In his State of the State address earlier this month, Rauner acknowledged a problem.
"The conditions in our prisons are unacceptable," Rauner said. "Inmates and corrections officers alike find themselves in an unsafe environment. It's wrong."
Rauner, who has yet to name a new director of corrections, didn't specify how many guards he plans to hire. He also touted reforming the parole system to help reduce the prisoner population, now at about 48,000, by a quarter over the next decade.
Overtime is a result of deep staff cuts at the prisons -- reductions that aren't saving money because hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on overtime pay, critics contend.
Double Shifts Add Up
Department of Corrections overtime paid annually over the past five years*
2014 $71.6 million
2013 $72.7 million
2012 $57.1 million
2011 $54.4 million
2010 $63.8 million*Fiscal years ending June 30.
Click on the following to read all of the report: News and Investigations Staff Overtime Soars At Illinois Prisons
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