Prison officers’ benefits will be protected
It got off to a rocky start, but indications are that the transition to private management at Hattieville Prison is beginning to gel. According to C.E.O. in the Ministry of Home Affairs, Alan Usher, letters went out this morning to all prison officers outlining their options for future employment. According to Usher, there will be no retrenchment of government employees and all will have their benefits protected. He urges all employees to apply for jobs now being offered by the Kolbe Foundation, new managers of the prison, and offers the following options.
If an applicant is accepted for employment all benefits will be retained and upon retirement the employee will receive the same package as if he or she had stayed in the public service. Government will pay the full amount with Kolbe making a reimbursement on a pro rata basis for the years served.
If an employee is not hired by Kolbe or does not seek to apply for a position, that person will be placed elsewhere in the public service.
The third option is for the employee to make a voluntary departure from government service, in which case normal procedures would apply.
The deadline for employees to make their decision is August thirtieth. Meanwhile, other changes are gradually being introduced at the prison. Security outside the walls is being handled on an interim basis by a twelve-man sharpshooting team that lives on site in mobile housing brought in for the occasion. The advantage to this arrangement is that even though only six men are on duty at any given time, in the event of an emergency the other six are available for backup. There are also plans to put the entire prison security force on two twelve-hour shifts instead of three eight-hour shifts. The thinking here is that the most vulnerable time at any prison is during a changing of the guard; by moving from three shifts to two you decrease that vulnerability by thirty-three percent.
A spokesman for the Kolbe Foundation told News 5 that with improvements in efficiency and the ability to access outside funding, they can run a vastly improved operation using the same three point seven million dollar annual budget previously spent by government. Recurrent savings will be used to make capital investments at the prison, augmenting an initial two hundred thousand dollars allocated by government for immediate improvements.
