Job Cuts Will Number Roughly 100 at Prisons

About 100 jobs at the four correctional facilities in Kincheloe are anticipated to be cut as a result of announced closure of the Hiawatha Correctional Facility, said Warden Jeffery Woods. The cuts will not be limited to the Hiawatha staff and will be based on seniority after transfers are made into the other three facilities in the complex.

The warden said about 45% of the 208 positions eliminated at the minimum-security prison will be absorbed into the other three Kincheloe facilities or nearby correctional facilities. He estimates 55 to 60 of those cuts will be custody officers, with the remainder coming from food services, healthcare, supervisors, and programming support staff. The Hiawatha facility employs about 130 custody officers and about 75 support staff.

No employees have been notified that they will lose their jobs when the prison closes, Mr. Woods said, but employees have an idea of who may be let go based on seniority.

"Have we identified the people that are going to be laid off? Absolutely not," he said. "It will likely be lower seniority people in the complex, and even then, some of those lower seniority people can transfer to other areas in the state."

Employees may be transferred to Kinross Correctional Facility, Chippewa Correctional Facility, Straits Correctional Facility, and Newberry Correctional Facility.

Scott Sarles, corrections officer at Hiawatha since 2005, said his job is safe, but that other officers pretty much know who's going to be without a job. Mr. Sarles has worked in the Michigan Department of Corrections for 22 years.

"You can basically start at the bottom of the seniority totem-pole and see who's going to be laid off," he said. "I'm number five in seniority, so I'm pretty safe. For me, it's just a matter of going across the street to another facility."

The staff reductions are the result of a planned shutdown of eight correctional facilities in Michigan announced Friday, June 5, by the state corrections department to help balance the state budget, which is $1.4 billion in the red. The Kincheloe prison will likely close its doors in early autumn, Mr. Woods said.

Three of the eight correctional facilities to be closed by November 1 are in the Upper Peninsula, including Camp Cusino in Shingleton and Camp Ottawa in Iron River, as well as the Hiawatha facility. The remaining five facilities closing their doors in the next four months are the Muskegon Correctional Facility, Standish Maximum Correctional Facility and Camp Kitwen in Painesdale, Camp Lehman in Grayling, and Camp White Lake in White Lake.

The planned shutdown of the eight prison facilities will eliminate 6,400 beds in the prison system. Many non-violent offenders beyond their minimum sentence date in level one and two security facilities will be looked at for early parole to reduce the overall prison population. Officials at the Hiawatha prison said it is too soon to tell how many of the 1,110 inmates could be paroled early.

Judge Bill Carmody of the 11th Circuit Court said it's too early to know how the early parole of inmates may affect crime in the Eastern Upper Peninsula. The state will hire more parole officers in the next few months to accommodate the influx of paroled offenders, he said.

"The devil is going to be in the details. It's difficult to predict what's going to happen," Judge Carmody said. "There's not a lot of easy answers."