A tongue-in-cheek Wall Street Journal op-ed compares the benefits of pursuing a Harvard degree and a career with CCPOA.
Training only takes four months, and upon graduating you can look forward to a job with great health, dental and vision benefits and a starting base salary between $45,288 and $65,364. By comparison, Harvard grads can expect to earn $49,897 fresh out of college and $124,759 after 20 years.
As a California prison guard, you can make six figures in overtime and bonuses alone. While Harvard-educated lawyers and consultants often have to work long hours with little recompense besides Chinese take-out, prison guards receive time-and-a-half whenever they work more than 40 hours a week. One sergeant with a base salary of $81,683 collected $114,334 in overtime and $8,648 in bonuses last year, and he's not even the highest paid.
The comparison, of course, makes no sense in many other ways, but it does draw attention to the salaries, justified by the "toughest beat" rhetoric CCPOA has used for years.
4 comments:
So the question is do corrections officers deserve the supposed obscene amount they make yearly. I have been a C/O for five years, I make about sixty thousand a year. I have a degree, and know several C/O's who do, so we are not all ignorant. Do I get over-time? Yes I do sometimes, by choice sometimes not, they're long straight eight hour shifts that I don't get a single break. After all that, I get a call and am told "you don't get to go home." I get to dig through human feces to find narcotics. Yes I make good money but I earn it and I don't belive it was a secret offer and the standards were not so harsh that those Harvard grad students couldn't apply, or maybe they lack the intestinal fortitude to put on these boots and pin on this badge strap on this gear and man-up and handle this business.
Yeah. You've got it tough. Holding other human beings in prison in a failed drug war while your union pushes for even tougher laws and longer punishments so it can get rich off of holding human beings in cages.
Rough life.
Their money to make from the bad guys and the good guys. It's all way been sent the ancient times. Nothing change.
Whether or not it is justified that the prisoners there are held for good reason it has nothing to do with what C/O's do on a daily basis. Most people have no idea what prisoners can be like who have nothing to lose and are going to be incarcerated for most of their life. I think the pay for what C/O's have to do is completely fair especially with the danger that they face and someone has to do the job so respect to those that do.
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