SHARE

By of the

Madison — Over the past two years, taxpayers shelled out $2.5 million in wages for nearly 400 prison workers to wait at home while they were investigated for alleged misconduct, records show.

Most of these workers were found to be at fault in some way. A few weren't. But they were all paid to do nothing for an average of 54 days and often despite some seemingly simple cases to sort out.

Seventy-two workers were paid at least $10,000 apiece while on leave, and one probation and parole agent was ultimately fired after being paid $79,725 while apparently on leave for nearly two years, according to records released to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

At times, workers waited on paid leave for weeks or even months and in the end received only a written reprimand. In other cases, investigators were deployed to look into a minor matter while more serious probes dragged on.

Those paid to stay home ranged from a female worker who reported being groped by an inmate to a psychologist accused of hanging out in his underwear with interns to workers who had criticized the Department of Corrections on social media.

"There has to be a better process," said Sen. Jon Erpenbach (D-Middleton), pointing to the way serious and trivial offenses were seemingly grouped together. "It's pointless to put someone on paid leave for months and months and months when they haven't done something seriously wrong. ... It really gets to the heart of what the problem is with the process."

The documents, which show a unit of five investigators and corrections supervisors trying at times to investigate dozens of workers on paid leave, raise questions about whether taxpayers' money is being used efficiently.

"We're talking about limited resources. Do you want to spend time and money on something like this or actual criminal activity occurring? I'd say the latter," said Paul Secunda, an employment attorney and Marquette University Law School faculty member. "You're trying to save money by not having many investigators, but you end up being inefficient in processing these cases."

The state also potentially racks up overtime when another worker must be paid to fill the shoes of an employee on leave, Secunda said.

"This is a state where you watch every dime," Secunda said. "This is problematic."

The state prison system has been shifting its system for disciplining workers over the past five years. In 2011, Gov. Scott Walker and GOP lawmakers repealed most collective bargaining for unionized corrections officers, upending the traditional discipline and grievance system.

Newly appointed Corrections Secretary Jon Litscher is reviewing the process in light of a new law by Walker and lawmakers overhauling the state's civil service system, agency spokesman Tristan Cook said. Litscher is seeking to prioritize investigations falling under the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act and to speed up the overall discipline process, he said.

"Secretary Litscher's overarching goal is to decrease the amount of time that staff are on administrative leave," Cook said.

Key findings

The state Department of Corrections took seven months to fulfill the open records request made by the Journal Sentinel for all the employees placed on paid leave between January 2014 and the beginning of 2016. The records showed that during that time:

■ 397 employees, or just over 4% of the agency's 8,980 employees, were paid $2.5 million in wages while on leave from the state Department of Corrections. At the state's troubled prison for juveniles, Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls — a facility that has been under criminal investigation for 18 months — 37 workers received $308,000 while on leave.

■ At least 18 employees were paid more than $20,000 while on leave.

■ Of the employees put on paid leave, about 140 were ultimately fired; some 100 resigned or retired; about 50 were suspended or demoted; more than 35 received a written reprimand; and 17 others received no discipline. Several dozen others were on medical leave or still had an open investigation or "no known outcome" of the investigation, according to the documents.

Cook said that putting an employee on leave doesn't automatically lead to more overtime from other workers since prisons are supposed to be staffed to handle that. Litscher, however, has already had to raise worker pay to try to address staffing shortages in state prisons.

If law enforcement agencies are investigating a prison worker, they may also ask the agency to suspend the internal investigation until the criminal probe is done.

"DOC is not able to impose discipline until its personnel investigation is completed, so this may have the effect of lengthening an employee's administrative leave," Cook said.

The Department of Corrections hasn't provided most names of the employees it placed on paid leave, the allegations against them, or the findings of the investigation. But it's possible to identify a few cases.

Facebook investigation

In one, seven disgruntled prison workers posted a series of gripes and obscene put-downs on Facebook on August 13 of last year and talked about attending the agency's recruitment booth at the local county fair to share their negative views of their jobs with recruits.

"I suggest if you see people stopping at those booths you listen real close to the spiel they will spin on how great and rewarding corrections is," wrote Dave Elliott, then a corrections officer at Waupun Correctional Institute. "Then maybe tell them about lack of off time, low wages, being forced overtime, no representation in the workplace...they should be told the other side of the story."

In response, then Corrections Secretary Ed Wall posted an online agency message condemning the Facebook comments as "overt actions designed to undermine our department," saying the posters showed a "total disregard for their fellow employees."

Later that month, the agency's small unit of five special investigators, who are paid roughly $30 an hour, were assigned seven separate investigations into each employee's comments that would last three months each. Investigators took days to review social media posts and unrelated emails and interviewed the seven on paid leave, their co-workers and their supervisors, according to investigation logs.

Elliott and the six other employees collectively were paid more than $75,000 while on leave. One employee, who had simply posted "Damn fools" on the thread, received more than $9,000 to stay at home. The investigation wrapped up in November and resulted in one termination, no discipline for two of the employees, and written reprimands for the other four.

Dan Meehan, a former corrections worker and union leader, said of a female corrections official that he'd like to "punch that smiling parade Marshal bitch in the face." No one else on the thread "liked" his comment. It was referred to police, but Meehan was not charged — in part because in that same post he said that he had never hit a woman and never actually would.

While on paid leave and under investigation, employees remain at home or near a phone during the hours they would normally be at work.

"It put a lot of strain on my family," said Elliott, who ultimately got a note in his personnel file and a job reassignment. "We didn't know what was going on or what would happen. I wanted to be at work.

"I kept asking investigators, 'Why aren't we at work? We could be saving other officers from having to work a double shift.'"

Todd Lockwood, one of the correctional officers who was investigated and retired shortly after the investigation concluded, said he believed the scope of the investigation was meant to send a message: Don't criticize the department.

"You have staff and youth getting assaulted at Lincoln Hills and you're worried about what somebody's saying on Facebook?" Lockwood said.

In another case, officials at Lincoln Hills decided no investigation or discipline was warranted after then-chief psychologist Vincent Ramos admitted to superiors that he'd made crude remarks to a female co-worker about the breasts of a teenager with mental illness.

A female co-worker reported that Ramos had said the girl's breasts looked "worn out, used, and abused."

Instead of discipline, Ramos was given additional training and asked not to call female staff and inmates "honey" and "babe."

Months later, prison officials did follow through on allegations that Ramos took photos of psychology interns in his hotel room while in his underwear. That investigation lasted a month and Ramos was fired in December 2015, but not before receiving $10,000 while on paid leave.

"Everything is wrong about that from the beginning," Erpenbach said of that case. "That shouldn't take a month; that takes 10 minutes. There's absolutely no justification for that."

In another investigation, two Lincoln Hills workers spent nearly a year on paid leave after they attempted to subdue an inmate engaged in a fight and the teenager ended up with a fractured arm. During that time, investigators also probed allegations that, in separate and unrelated cases, the employees used excessive force with inmates.

Travis Taves was paid almost $40,000 over nearly a year. His co-worker Timothy Johnson was put on leave for 10 months before he resigned, after receiving nearly $45,000 while under investigation.

In a much different case at Lincoln Hills, a female employee was groped by a teenage inmate and then was put on paid leave for five weeks while the agency investigated prisoners' claims that the victim had invited the touching. She was paid more than $3,500.

The female employee wasn't interviewed by investigators until nearly two months after reporting the groping. To the victim's frustration, the investigators interviewed nine inmates but no staff members.

"Why is it that my partner or even Denise (Dillenberg, who witnessed the taunting of the victim by inmates) have not been talked to about any of these supposed allegations?" the employee told investigators. "I'm a little flabbergasted that nobody's been talked to."

The investigation was dropped weeks later after an inmate threatened to level false allegations against another staff member, and said he would trump up baseless charges in a similar fashion to what was done to the female employee.

Patrick Marley of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.