Posted on 06/25/2009 6:02:11 AM PDT by Born Conservative
Tens Of Thousands Pennsylvania Prison Inmates ... ... will still be paid for the jobs they do at state correctional institutions even as the people who guard them and see to their welfare run the risk of going unpaid in the event of a budget impasse this summer, The Morning Call has learned.
Concerns about public safety helped drive the decision to continue paying the 31,175 inmates who do everything from serve meals to sweep cell-blocks at the state’s 27 correctional institutions. They’re paid 19 cents to 42 cents an hour for their labors, spokespeople for Gov. Ed Rendell and the state Corrections Department said.
Inmates use the money they earn from prison jobs to buy medication, toiletries and snacks at prison commissaries, said Bill DiMascio of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, a Philadelphia-based group that advocates on behalf of prisoners.
Currently able to hold a maxmimum of 43,000 inmates, the state prison population now numbers 50,568 and “we believe that depriving prisoners of cigarettes would merely increase tension in already overcrowded prisons,” Rendell administration spokesman Chuck Ardo said.
Corrections Department spokeswoman Susan McNaughton said the inmates work in key maintenance roles, so “having them continue their work and paying them is important to the operation of our state prison system.”
The pay issue has caught the attention of some state lawmakers. And it’s outraged the head of the state’s prison guards union, who says that if corrections officers and scores of other state employees have to go without paychecks this summer, then inmates should as well.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.mcall.com ...
Ping
No pay for guards ... no guards should bother reporting. Let the idiot politicians playing games put in a couple of shifts babysitting society’s dregs.
Why should this sort of lunacy surprise anyone? It’s Pa. and fast Eddie, folks!
Why are prisoners getting paid anyway?
Ed Rendell’s Pennsylvania
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