Jesse Scheckner
Upwards of 150 jobs within the Department of Corrections (DOC) have been vacant for more than 90 days, and there’s disagreement across the rotunda about what to do with them.
For now, the House wants to nix them all — a proposal that would cut nearly $9.5 million from the coming budget that lawmakers returned to Tallahassee this week to hash out.
The Senate, meanwhile, doesn’t want to cut any of the prison jobs. The upper chamber hasn’t budged from its position, making zero changes on the issue in its first offer to the lower chamber on criminal and civil justice expenditures for the 2025-26 fiscal year.
The DOC — which has a website dedicated to hiring and today offers a starting pay of $22 per hour, not counting new hire and retention bonuses — has long suffered from worker shortages.
A state jobs website lists 131 open positions. But those posts may not reflect the 150 contemplated in the budget; the oldest job opening listed, a senior chaplain post in Miami, was listed less than a month and a half ago.
DOC Deputy Secretary Richard Comerford advised lawmakers in early 2023 that the department had “significant vacancies in maintenance, education, probation, inspectors and support staff, not just correctional officers.”
The minimum annual base salary for correctional officers, after passing the state officer exam, is $47,132.80, 66 cents per hour more than the hiring rate.
DOC is Florida’s largest state agency and the third-largest prison system in the country, with some 24,000 employees and 89,000 inmates. Accordingly, it’s among the state’s costliest agencies to run. The coming budget has set aside more than $3.5 billion for its operation over the next year.
A report from the Department of Management Services last March also projected Florida will need to spend $2.2 billion more over the next 20 years to address system needs that have persisted for years.
