Extended sentence: At the Dallas County Jail, where guards work 70-hour weeks, overtime costs millions and poses dangers

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If the fine folks at Lehman Brothers are looking for work, they may want to take a job at the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department. They could use the money.

Just ask Samuel Adkins, a guard at the jail's central intake department, who earned more than $23,000 in overtime pay in just a six-month period. Averaging nearly 30 bonus hours a week, Adkins nearly doubled his salary.

Or you could talk to the tireless Muriana Olugbode, who walks the beat at the West Tower and has collected $20,000 in overtime pay. The Lou Gehrig of jailers, Olugbode has averaged more than $70,000 in total compensation the last two years -- nearly $30,000 more than a guard's base salary.

For most of her first term, Dallas Sheriff Lupe Valdez has been sharply rebuked for her shop’s skyrocketing overtime costs, which have come millions of dollars over-budget year after year. It’s an issue that simply hasn’t gone away. The sheriff blamed the county commissioners, they sniped a bit at her and the guards continued to grab lots of extra shifts — even after the feds sued the county for neglecting the constitutional rights of inmates.

Now on the campaign trail, a confident Valdez claims she has addressed overtime pay, telling the Dallas Morning News that it is "dropping dramatically."

And she's right -- if by "dramatically," she means, "things are probably getting worse." A close look at the department’s payroll records provides a contrasting look at jail staff still working ridiculous hours while nearly doubling their base salary in OT work.

Earlier this month, Texas Watchdog requested the last six months of overtime records from the Dallas County Sheriff's Department, covering a period from February-August 2008. Here are some of our findings:

• More than 50 employees collected more than $10,000 in overtime pay in just a six-month time period. Contrast that to the county auditor's report, which looked at overtime pay at the sheriff's department for the first six months of the most recent fiscal year -- where 37 employees made more than $10,000 in overtime. Where's that dramatic improvement again?


• On more than 320 occasions, an employee has worked more than 40 hours of overtime over a two-week period. (Employees are paid every two weeks.)


• On nearly 25 occasions, an employee logged more than 64 overtime hours over two weeks. Earlier this year, Chief Deputy Gary Lindsey told the Morning News that guards can't work more than 32 hours of overtime a week according to a new department policy. We’ll let you do the math here on whether anyone is enforcing that policy.


• Carolyn Ray, who walks the beat at the Suzanne Kays Detention Center, worked more than 96 overtime hours in a 14-day period ending on April 25. Ray was one of seven employees at the medium-security jail who averaged more than 30 hours of weekly overtime during that same time period. Attention, lawyers: If you have a client who went without medical care at the facility in late April, this could be Exhibit A.

Two years ago, in the wake of a federal investigation of the jail, the Dallas County Commissioners Court allocated enough money for Valdez to hire more than 250 new jailers. But the sheriff has struggled to recruit new guards, putting her department in a position where it has to assign overtime if it wants to follow state law. The Texas Commission on Jail Standards requires a ratio of 48 officers for every inmate.

"The jail is utilizing so much overtime because they’re having trouble bringing on officers, ” says Adan Munoz, the executive director of the Texas agency.

Currently, the sheriff’s office is advertising for open guard positions on its Web site. Kim Leach, the spokesperson for the department, says that it can be difficult to recruit qualified applicants.

“It’s not as easy as just going out and saying, ‘Hey, come out here, and we’ll hire you,’” Leach says. “This is not an easy job; it’s not like going to work at a department store. There are certain things you have to know, and people have to pass background checks.”

Interestingly, Scott Evans, the president of the Dallas County Sheriff’s Association, which endorsed Valdez’s opponent, Lowell Cannaday, defends the sheriff on the department’s overtime expenditures. He says that the real issue is that the county commissioners shortchanged the jail for years, and only recently have they begun to play catch up. Still, you can’t fix a staffing problem overnight, wave a magic wand and have enough guards at your jail.

“A lot of this is really not the sheriff’s fault — it’s the fault of the county commissioners for understaffing the jails for years and years and years,” he says, adding that when he worked at the jail in the early '90s, whoever wanted overtime got it. “It is a safety issue if you have someone up there who can’t stay awake, but the only real way to fix that is to hire enough people to staff your jails.”

Evans’ argument is not without merit. The Texas Commission on Jail Standards has flunked the jail five years running, in part because it didn’t have enough guards on duty. So, if you don’t have the bodies in the building, you work the ones you have even more.

Even if the jail is understaffed, it doesn’t seem smart to have guards patrolling past violent offenders and the mentally ill in the middle of a 70-hour work week. That's why the sheriff's office implemented restrictions on OT work in the first place, even if many guards seem to work as much as they want.

Naturally, Republican challenger Cannaday has used Valdez’s overtime budget as a prime example of her management style.

“I don’t understand why there is a need for that kind of overtime unless you don’t have accountability,” says Cannaday, a former police chief of Irving. “My word, that kind of money in a six-month period, somebody is not paying attention to what’s going on.”

Even if the issue of overtime in Dallas is a complicated one, few people disagree that it poses a serious problem for the department. This one just comes down to basic common sense.

“I wouldn’t let my officers put in those kinds of hours in week after week,” says Michael Keller, a retired police chief and law enforcement consultant. “It’s a stressful job with a lot of work, and certainly something has to suffer, either the employee’s health or the quality of the work. We have 40-hour work weeks for a reason.”

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	Tuesday, 09/23/2008 - 13:52 This is BS
	Paul Wednesday, 09/24/2008 - 07:46 Matt, you have quite a few names of people who arent jailers, don't work in the jails, and have nothing to do with the jails. You also have quite a few names of people that get overtime for thing like court supboenas (cant avoid them and they are an unavoidable by-product in this line of work) as well as federally funded overtime for specialized enforcement (which costs the county nothing, I think). As far as I know, the Commissioners arent crying foul about either of these categories. Perhaps you could do an open records request for overtime flagged as "minimum staffing" to get a more realistic number for jail overtime.
	Wednesday, 09/24/2008 - 23:53 YOU DO NOT KNOW THE DANGER THAT YOU ARE PUTTING OFFICERS IN WHEN YOU GIVE THIER FULL NAMES. WE DO NOT WORK IN THE EASY JOB OF A NEWSPAPER. WHEN YOU PUBLISH THE NAMES YOU PUT NOT ONLY THE OFFICER'S IN DANGER BUT ALSO OUR FAMLIY'S. THERE IS A RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH UNLESS IT GETS SOMEONE HURT. YOU CANT DO THE JOB SO YOUR GOING TO HIDE BEHIND A PEN. YOUR NOT MAN ENOUGH TO DO WHAT HALF THE OFFICER'S DO.
	Anonymous Thursday, 09/25/2008 - 11:28 Non of the officers are forced to work overtime but however if Cannaday is the new Sheriif and cuts overtime, the budget may get fixed but he will need more officers remember the Department did not receive a raise. Overtime is essential right now. Nobody is complaining or inquiring about the Deputy\'s that are working part-times over 32hrs a week so why is it a problem with Detention Officers. Most Dso\'s will vote Lupe. Cannaday will cut Dso pay by cutting overtime who wants that.
	Matt Pulle Thursday, 09/25/2008 - 11:48 There are some great comments here, thanks. Since we're lucky to have a few insiders checking in, can anyone speak to just how hard is it for DSOs to consistently work 60-70 hours a week. Does that just go with the territory? Or does it wear on people after a while?
	some one who knows the real Thursday, 10/02/2008 - 01:56 First you have to understand what the law requires. The 1 to 48 ratio must be met on every shift, in every jail that houses inmates. Everyone does not want to work overtime. So it can be very difficult to find people to work overtime to met the required staffing. So instead of not being in compliance you will some people that will go over the 32 hour a week rule. These people have helped to keep us out of trouble with the powers that be.