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Help wanted: Individual who works well under pressure, even tempered, willing to work 12 hour shifts with murderers, rapists, armed robbers and others. Below market pay. Uniforms provided. That’s how a want ad for the Department of Corrections might read, and as Mike Vasilinda tells us, it’s no wonder the the Department has 1300 openings on any given day.

The Department of Corrections took some of the deepest cuts of any agency during the recession. Its budget this year is still 200 million less than it was in 2010.

Corrections Secretary Julie Jones says the cuts have created problems.

“We cut too deep in core areas in critical positions” says Jones.

The result: short staffing.  DOC had a vacancy rate of 10 percent last year. Its Down to just under 7 percent now.

“I lose them to retirement” says Jones, “I lose them to disciplinary reasons. I lose them to other agencies. So, there is a need at any one time for thirteen to fourteen hundred.”

The agency plans to hire 4 thousand corrections officers this year. It will do it by holding job fairs like this one.

“This is a supplemental application” one applicant is told.

Candidates trickled in. Two applicants, including Curtis Pride, were former officers who left for greener pastures and want to come back.

“The position I was in as a correctional officer gives me a chance to supervise the inmates and enable them to help themselves” says Pride.

Others, like Sarah Spell, were first time job seekers.

“Like, I’m harsh, I’ll be harsh if I have to. But, I love the human race, even if sometimes they don’t love me back” say Spell.

“Even if an applicant is accepted here today, about one in five  don’t make it through the process. That’s because they fail a background check, or some other flaw.”

To cope with the shortage of job candidates, Corrections plan to close some prisons where finding good staff is tough. then open work camps and a mothballed prison in a more populated area. In the end, it will still need to pay more than most local jails, which it doesn’t do today.

Starting salary for a corrections officer is just over thirty thousand a year. DOC also provides inexpensive health care, and paid vacations.