DAVENPORT, Iowa — The Scott County jail has been on partial lockdown for a month now following fighting between inmates. A partial lockdown means half the inmates are locked down for half the day, then the other half is on lockdown for the remainder of the day.
Some of those fights have resulted in assaults on correctional officers, Sheriff Tim Lane said.
"Right now, people that are in the jail are in the jail because they have committed more serious felonies and they are pretrial, pre-sentence inmates," Lane said. "Based on that alone, the demographics post-COVID have changed in the jail and it has made it more violent."
At the same time, Scott County continues to deal with a shortage of correctional officers. At full staff, 64 officers are working in the jail, but Lane would like to hire 10 to 12 more.
"The correctional officers have to work more hours," Lane said. "And because they're working more hours, it's already difficult when you're on 12-hour shifts that some of them extend to 16 hours. That's just way too long to work in a correctional facility without a break. That's just not good for the overall health of the employee."
That also means inmates are seeing the same correctional officers for longer periods of time.
Three weekends ago, correctional officers worked a combined 170 hours of overtime to meet the minimum staffing requirement.
Lane said he has made three proposals to the Scott County Board of Supervisors to address the correctional officer shortage.
One is to raise the overtime rate from time and a half to time and three quarters. The Board of Supervisors will vote on whether to approve that change on Thursday, Aug. 17.
"That is to relieve some of the immediate pain that the correctional officers are experiencing with all the overtime," Lane said.
He's also requesting a $2-an-hour supplemental pay for all correctional officers. However, he calls both of those proposals only short-term solutions.
"Whenever it comes to short-term solutions, what happens is we have to remove those solutions at some point," Lane said. "There's pain at that time. That's why I'm saying that this go around, the short-term solutions last time did not fix the problem in the long term. This time, it's time to look at the long-term."
Lane believes that the long-term solution is changing a 2018 pay policy. That year, the county changed the pay scale for large pay increases for correctional officers. Instead of receiving a large pay raise within the first two or three years, they weren't receiving it until year nine.
"Those changes affected the correctional officers, in my opinion, in a negative way," he said. "What I'm saying is we need to go back to the way that we used to do it, and we give large pay raises within the first two to three years of them being correctional officers and we taper it off over a number of years."
Scott County is losing most of its correctional officers within their first four years, Lane said. Those who stay for five years tend to stay long-term.
"If we can front load those pay increases, I believe we can get them to stay," Lane said.
The next step for his proposal is to study what it will cost the county. Lane said since he's not fully staffed, he has extra money in his budget.
Right now, he doesn't know what that cost would be. It would depend on how much they decide to front-load the pay scale. However, Lane said the starting salary will remain roughly the same, as well as the top salary.
"It's going to cost some money in order to change the pay scale," Lane said. "Of course, we're looking to stay within budget in order to do that. So we need to do a serious calculation on moving money from the savings over to the problem. And that will take some time."