Legal News

Sheriff's Office: Cutting Sheriff's Overtime May Affect Prison Population

By Brian Harris

By Amaris Elliott-Engel
Of the Legal Staff
 
In a memo sent to court leaders and obtained by The Legal, the Philadelphia Sheriff's Office said that some of its efforts to reduce its overtime bill require it to end some of the staffing patterns the office put in place to address prison overcrowding.

The Sheriff's Office is running more than $2 million in overtime and has been asked by the Nutter administration to reduce its overtime bill by 25 percent.

Chief Deputy Sheriff Barbara A. Deeley said in the memo that the office has already reduced its overtime expenses by $150,000 with several measures:

* reducing the number of deputies assigned to Family Court;

*dividing Traffic court personnel into two shifts in order to accommodate Traffic Court's evening hours;

*rotating deputies in courtrooms, rather than assigning deputies to specific courtrooms;

*ending the practice of redeploying evening security personnel to work in the Criminal Justice Center during the day.

Deeley, however, said: "We would like to make it clear to the court, however, that this new plan will discontinue many of the staffing patterns put in place two years ago in an effort to address the overcrowded prison population."

Deeley said those arrangements included transporting more defendants because more courtrooms were being scheduled and transporting defendants starting one hour earlier in the morning. The office met the need by redeploying deputies assigned to evening shifts to work during the day, and staffing for the evening shifts was accomplished through overtime pay, Deeley wrote.

Full post as published by The Legal Intelligencer Blog on June 29, 2010 (boomark / email).