Scott made headway on prison salaries promise

In 2010, Rick Scott made a bold promise to cut $1 billion (then nearly 40 percent) from the state prison system.

He never got close, and that promise rates Broken.

But we still wanted to check in on one way he said he would attain that savings. During the campaign Scott promised to pay competitive market based salaries for corrections officers.

In this case, Scott was saying corrections officers made too much compared to their peers, not too little.

So what happened over eight years?

Base salaries for state corrections officers remained unchanged for the first six years of Scott's tenure, though corrections officers did receive a bonus along with other state employees in 2013.

However, in 2017, Scott supported pay raises for state corrections officers.

"The governor believes in investments that allow the Florida Department of Corrections to better retain officers and have an experienced workforce," Scott spokesman McKinley Lewis said in 2017.

That year, starting salaries for correctional officers went from $30,926 to $33,500. For sergeants, starting pay increased from $32,783 to $36,850.

The median salary for Florida correctional officers was $33,500 in 2017-18, according to Department of Corrections spokesman Patrick Manderfield. (That does not apply to staff at privately run prisons.)

That appears to be lower than the national average, although the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows a combined category of correctional officers and bailiffs earning a median salary of $43,510. But the salaries remain more than Florida's private prison workforce.

The starting pay, for an officer at Gadsden Correctional Facility, run by Management & Training Corporation, was $27,040, according to that report. At Graceville Correctional Facility, operated by the GEO Group, it was $32,032.

Scott promised to save money buy holding the line on salaries of the state's corrections workforce. In some ways, he succeeded, allowing only sporadic salary increases. But the pay for the state jobs remains higher than jobs at Florida private prison facilities.

We rate this Compromise.