Looking Forward to Jail : Cadets Train to Fill 9,000 Correctional Officer Jobs Due in Next 2 Years Because of Prison-Building Boom

GALT, Calif. — Friends and family are still uncertain as to what came over 44-year-old Mary Whitsett.

“They think I’m crazy,” the Techachapi grandmother of three laughed.

Just three weeks ago, Whitsett was an office worker. Now, she is among the nearly 400 cadets attending California’s only academy for correctional officers, the Richard A. McGee Correction Training Center, located along a rural road in this sleepy Sacramento Valley community.

And although only three weeks remain before graduation, her confidence, like that of many of the new cadets, is wavering.

“I sure hope I’ll make it. It’s awfully hard,” she said.

Whitsett and the other cadets here for the six-week course are part of an unprecedented recruitment effort as the state Department of Corrections scrambles to hire and train thousands of new workers to operate proposed new prisons. As part of a vast expansion program, the voters in 1981 and 1984 approved two bond issues to finance the construction of 24 new prisons that will each hold from 300 to 3,000 inmates.

Far Beyond Capacity

The speciality building boom has been brought on by California’s tougher criminal sentencing laws, which have helped push the burgeoning prison population to more than 55,000, far beyond the 31,853-capacity of the state’s 12 existing prisons.

To staff the new prisons, said Carlos Sanchez, chief of standards and selections for the department, about 30,000 new officers are needed during the next 10 years, 9,000 of them over the next two years. “I can’t imagine another state agency that’s facing the kind of growth that we are,” Sanchez said.

A major public relations campaign, complete with paid advertisements and promoting $26,000-plus starting salaries, is part of the drive, as is a special attempt to recruit women and minorities, Sanchez said.

“We really need to appoint a large number of women . . . and we also have a significant need for Hispanics and Asians,” Sanchez said. Of the 9,000 correctional officers employed in prisons now, just under 17% are women, Sanchez said, and the department wants the percentage raised to more than 40% over the next 10 years.

To get into the academy, candidates must be at least 21 years old, a U.S. citizen with a high school or General Education Diploma and no felony convictions. Then they must pass tests that include one written and two medical examinations, a physical ability check, a personal interview and a 90-day personal background investigation.

Cadets spend about 50 hours in classroom and field training and are required to achieve an 80% minimum score on weekly academic examinations and a minimum 85% in overall academy performance. The demands create a nervousness in the future officers, who are aware that on average, 11% of each class fails to complete the program.

“The greatest single reason is academic failure,” training center administrator Jim Esten said of the drop-out rate. “A very small number find that they just don’t fit and they leave the academy. Other people show up, intrigued with the job, but when they actually see the inside of a prison (during the last week of instruction), they decide that it’s not the job for them.”

Most Dangerous Civilian Job

Today’s intensive academy training is geared to preparing cadets for what is generally regarded as one of the most dangerous civilian occupations anywhere. It includes nighttime duty shifts that subject cadets to fatigue and stress, simulating conditions that often accompany prison work, Esten said.

Instruction ranges from criminal law, peace officer ethics and conduct, report writing and sexual harassment prevention to defensive driving and the use of firearms, including rifles, revolvers and shotguns.

During the stay at the academy, 27 hours are devoted to physical conditioning, mainly aerobic dance, running and calisthenics. At the end of the six-week session, the cadets must be able to run 2 1/2 miles in 30 minutes and complete 35 sit-ups and 35 push-ups.

Cadets also must undergo 16 hours of self-defense training that includes tackling and pinning an opponent, bare-handed tactics against weapon-wielding assailants, and other maneuvers such as safely removing an agitated inmate from a cell.

Recently added to the academic lessons was a 10-hour study of verbal and non-verbal communication techniques to deal with troublesome inmates and situations, a course considered by administrators as one of the most useful lessons.

“It’s important because if you can effectively communicate with people, most of the time you never get to the point where you have to write up inmates or be violent with them,” said instructor Sgt. Liz Mitchell.

Such training is aimed at adding professional polish to the job of correctional officer, long referred to as “prison guard.”

“There used to be the old stigma--’prison,’ ‘guard,’ ‘incarceration’--all those harsh words. Then, they changed that and it went to ‘correctional officers,’ ‘institutions,’--a softer type of thing,” Mitchell said.

A recently released department study of correctional officer turnover rates showed 92.9% of the officers surveyed viewed their job as “more demanding and stressful than most jobs,” with 60% agreeing that “a lot of correctional officers have family problems because of stress on the job.” The department turnover rate itself is 11.6%.

Violent Environment

“I was assigned a midnight to 8 a.m. shift for nine months. That was hard to do after being separated (from family) for a month and a half while attending the academy,” recalled Paul Chatham, 27, a correctional officer at California Men’s Colony, San Luis Obispo.

“But it (the job) does provide avenues of advancement. . . . You have to take both into account and decide if it’s for you,” he said.

Another consideration for aspiring correctional officers is the violent environment inside California’s prisons. Last year, the department reported 739 inmate assaults against prison staff members.

At San Quentin prison alone, 136 inmate attacks were reported against prison employees last year, up from eight in 1978.

“It’s not a nice environment,” Novey said of the often dangerous prison system.

Nevertheless, Whitsett and most of the cadets interviewed by The Times said the academy training in self-defense and communication would prepare them adequately, and that the attractive salary and promotional opportunities far outweighed factors of stress and danger.

Some, such as Denise Hernandez, 23, of Fontana said the potential danger of working with hardened prison convicts “doesn’t bother me at all.”

“The money is good. The benefits are good. It’s a good career,” she said.

Mike Grimm, 27, a former Air Force military policeman from Sacramento, agreed: “The money is really good and the advancement is good once you’ve been here a couple years. You’ve got to be able to handle it, that’s all. If you can’t handle it, you’re out of a job.”

Chatham, who said he worked in a higher-paying construction job before joining the Department of Corrections, said that job satisfaction and the potential for “upward mobility” keeps him with the department.

“It really is a good job,” he said. “Honest to God! I like it!”