The state Department of Juvenile Justice loses roughly half its prison guards annually, leading to dangerously thin staffing and a high proportion of inexperienced guards, a state audit released Friday concludes.
Such staffing deficiencies potentially put both guards and juvenile inmates at risk, the audit said. The audit comes after a federal survey last year determined Georgia’s juveniles were among the most likely in the nation to say they had been sexually victimized within a state detention facility
The Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts reviewed turnover among guards at the state Department of Juvenile Justice. DJJ, which spends more than $200 million annually to house, educate and counsel youth offenders, oversees more than 47,000 juveniles. About 14,700 of them are in detention facilities. The others are served through community programs.
Turnover in these facilities is 49 percent.
Here are five takeaways from the audit.
Pay must increase. The starting pay for a DJJ guard is $24,000. Paths to higher wages are not made widely available, the audit said. Consequently, frustrated guards often leave after a few years, if not a few months. Some find higher pay for similar work in Georgia's counties, which can pay from $1,000-$15,000 more than DJJ.
Training is costly. Each guard who leaves take with them valuable training the agency must pay for when it hires new employees. It costs, the audit said, $19,000 to hire and train a new guard for a DJJ facility.
Lack of strong management, leadership also keeps turnover high. While pay might be the main driver of constant turnover, another issue the audit cites is management failures. More than 40 percent of guards surveyed said they did not have a good working relationship with their supervisors. Such dissatisfaction is noteworthy in facilities with high turnover. The study cites a big decrease in turnover at a facility where a newly hired management team was well regarded by staff.
Square pegs for round holes. Under pressure to "comply with required youth-to-staff ratios, DJJ facilities have hired a significant number of officers who, while meeting minimum qualifications, are not well-suited for the position," the report concludes. Inadequate employee screening means the agency spends significant dollars to train people who have little chance of succeeding.
Turnover may contribute to assaults, misconduct. Turnover, the audit says, "may contribute to the frequency and type of incidents that occur at DJJ facilities. Officers with more experience interacting with youth should be more capable of preventing incidents from occurring," the audit concludes. It did not provide specifics. But it referenced a separate federal survey released last year that shows four Georgia lockups for juveniles were among the 13 nationwide that had the highest percentage of youth reporting inappropriate sexual contact with detention officers. A regional youth detention center in Paulding County led the nation with 32.1 percent of the teenagers surveyed anonymously reporting they were victimized sexually by either staff or other juveniles. That was more than three times the national rate of 9.5 percent.
