agent

registered nurse

office assistant

social worker

correctional officer

Wisconsin Department of Corrections

-Compensation/Benefits:  Pay has not kept up with inflation or our peers in neighboring states.  Agent pay starts at roughly $20/Hr and progresses to approximately $24/Hr after being appointed to Senior Agent.  This appointment only occurs when your direct supervisor deems appropriate, meaning some get this after 18 months, whereas others 24-36 months.  After making Senior Agent there is no pay progression other than yearly 2% general wage increases.  This means Agents with 10-15 years experience make negligibly a few dollars more than a new employee.  After 30+ years you'll make approximately $30/Hr.   DOC staff in institutions (Officers and Sgt's) have pay increases at years 1,2,3,5,10,15,20...why don't Agents, who knows. 
 Making $24/Hr in the North woods probably is sufficient where the cost of living is low.  Anywhere in a metro area you are out of luck unless you have someone to split costs with.  It amazes me that so many Agents are forced to have second jobs, or pick up overtime at the local institutions just to survive.   PTO is awesome as with any State job,  Agents receive protective status retirement meaning we can retire at 50. You retail this status after just one year on the job (so stick it out through that time at least).  The only other staff in the state who get this are LE and CO's.  We have the benefit of low assault rate, and working M-F 9-5.  

-Workload:  Has become extremely focused on administrative/clerical work.  We are glorified paper pushers and ride a desk all day.  I spend half of my week completing basic paperwork and data entry.  Tasks that could be completed by an entry level office support staff member.  DOC has also really pushed the counselor role onto Agents in the last 3 years.  We are expected to teach each client a skill/lesson in each supervision contact, role play this skill, assign homework, address violations, all within a 25 minute appointment.  When you supervise 100+ clients, doing so is not feasible, and if we are expected to be social workers/counselors why not go back to school and become one and make more than an Agent?  DOC does not give much of any effort to help clients achieve the basics, think housing, clothing, and food.  Its no wonder so many fail when we can't "afford" to pay the bill for these most basic services.  DOC has placed more and more seemingly small tasks onto Agents since the repeal of our union.  These small tasks add up over time, and make the job completely unrealistic.  Staff who have been on the job for more than a few years specifically note that this job is a 180 from what is was even just a decade ago, and not in a good way.  Our staff are literally made up of Agents with less than 5 years experience, or those with 20+ years who are just here for the benefits and early retirement.

-Being an Agent is a good stepping stone to other careers.  In my 8 years here my co workers have moved into law enforcement, corrections, social work/counseling, HR, law, etc.  Surprisingly they often come back saying they make more money, often still in state service with the same benefits, and are significantly less stressed.   We literally do a piece of each of those roles, and we are able to network with almost every section of the CJ system.   It's not a terrible job, assuming you have a supportive supervisor and good peers. We loose about 1/5 of Agents through resignation and retirement each year.  This means we are constantly understaffed, and undereducated.  The Department fails to retain staff beyond the 3-5 year anniversary mark.  This shows in our quality of work and how ineffective at times we are actually able to be a "public safety" agency.  I would encourage anyone applying to network and have an exit plan.  If you are one of the few that can thrive on never having all of your work done, unrealistic expectations, and the thrill of wearing multiple hats, hang in there and 25 years will go by like a blur.  
  

Specific institutions are facing a volatile work environment and, have been for years. It is a vicious circle of complex inter-related issues that directly affect the climate and conditions of the work environments within the institutions. 

Safety of staff is and has been a large concern for specific institutions that need direct assistance from those in charge in Madison, but concerns are continuously and consistently ignored or addressed poorly. The biggest concerns are severe understaffing resulting in poor staff morale, running inmate activities while being short first responders, a disproportionate representation of new staff to veteran staff, an inadequate and compromised training of new staff due to the decrease in veteran staff numbers, burnout from consistently training staff that either quit, transfer, or get terminated, an increase in use and presence of drugs (prescription and illegal) inside the institution, stress and burnout from long working hours and overtime (mainly due to staff shortages), and increased presence of weapons and contraband, and a consistent increase in the number of staff who compromise security through poor practice of security related work duties or the introduction of contraband into the institutions. Additionally, administrative management, supervisors, as well as civilian teaching, social worker, and phycology/medical staff expect already short-handed security staff to continuously take on more and more daunting and trivial job duties without question. They expect frontline staff to do more work with less help in the same amount of time, which takes away the emphasis on the first priority of a correctional officer: security.

In part, some issues are a direct result of inmates being defiant, disrespectful, and displaying belligerent behavior with waning accountability due to staff indifference or decreased staff morale. This can at times stem from consistent resistance from the standpoint of correctional program staff and upper management to uphold and support the goals of security staff. However, from an inmate welfare standpoint, it is also due to issues like poor food quality, overcrowding, discipline which does not provide a deterrent to poor inmate behavior, which as it stands is a result of the aforementioned indifference and disagreement on the roles of security. Furthermore elimination of inmate jobs and education, frequent cancelation of inmate activities creating idleness, and inmate tension rising over inconsistency and uncertain direction of the DOC and the institution. 

These factors contribute immensely to staff shortages and safety, and increasingly contribute to what likely may result in a critical incident occurring at an institution. Line staff have consistently voiced their concerns to prison administration, both within their respective institutions and to the administrators at Madison, in regards to these issues. Understandably, these issues are due to limited options and resources, and past legislation of former administrations. However, reports of prison administration and management staff retaliating against and undermining line staff, hostile work conditions, deteriorating staff morale and safety conditions, and staffing shortages due to turnover or failure to retain staff continue to cause a vicious circle of cause-and-effect tribulations unto themselves. If we do not address these issues we jeopardize the safety and security of staff, inmates, and the general public.

I worked for the ICOTS Deputy Administrator, who always had an open door policy should any work questions arise. The Office Operations Associate (OOA) position I held was classified as temporary, and was responsible for several critical functions.

First, data validation of 5k offender records. Four internal databases were cross-referenced prior to migration.

Second, the Office Operations Associate had to answer the following questions: Offender transferred to another state? Transfer form received? Offender on parole? Each answer meant updating offender data within the legacy databases, contacting the state by mail merge email and/or phone call, or deleting the offender record. I created an internal spreadsheet that tracked the answers to these questions, and established the work that needed to be done prior to database migration.

Third, tracking and updating an employee training database. And fourth, answering questions about the new ICOTS online database.
As training was completed, any questions about where offender data needed to be entered into ICOTS became less and less. Answers were included in a FAQ page.

A high level of coordination was required for this position. The database had to be migrated within 6 months. My supervisor created this new position, asked for qualified candidates, and hired me to help complete the database migration. He also gave me an excellent referral via LindedIn, and thanked me personally for the good work I had done.

I'm glad I can post this to Facebook, and hope this will lead me into more positions like this one!

The DOC isn't for Social Workers that truly want to help inmates resolve issues in a therapeutic manner.  The people that already worked there for years have an overall belief in reporting unknown crimes, and in order to have a true therapeutic environment clients (inmates) need to feel safe and trust their clinician.  There are some great COs  but many of them enjoy punishing inmates further by being condescending and tend to escalate vs deescalste inmate agitation.  An inmates punishment is being in prison.  It's not to up to staff to force extra consequences by dehumanizing inmates further.  Most inmates will eventually be released back into society and the more dehumanizing that occurs the harder it is for an inmate to be free and feel more human and less like a caged animal.  And people wonder why recidivism occurs.  Imprisonment should be used as the last resort in order to keep the public safe, but it seems to be used more than it was intended.  Our justice system is broken.  Be a fly on the wall for one day at RCI and I'm guessing you will gain different opinions about our criminal justice system.

Working in a prison is different every day. Sometimes it can be busy and full of danger and other days can be slow and boring. There is not a typical day in the prison. Every day we start shift by checking inventory and doing a round around the unit to make sure nobody is breaking rules and nobody is injured or trying to injure themselves. On a good day the inmates are out for day room, school and recreation the majority of the day from 6:00am until 11:45pm. We are here to make sure problems are solved and inmates are safe. We often help rehabilitate inmates for their reentry onto the streets.  Their will be some days where we have to deal with medical emergencies, suicide attempts, fights, inmates refusing to come out of their cells and other behavior problems. 
The most enjoyable part of my job is being able to affectively communicate with inmates to solve problems quickly without having much aggression. The hardest part of my job is the mental stress. Knowing the crimes of some of these men and not treating anybody differently. They are all human beings and deserve to be treated as such regardless of their crime. It also becomes difficult when inmates are not compliant and you have to use force for them to become compliant.

If you're the type who isn't working for a incentive, then this job is for you. NO ONE EVER gets a 5 star rating unless you die for the company, probably. Literally had my supervisor tell me that, because there's "always" room for improvement. But the improvement doesn't apply to the toxic workers that they have working there. If you have a catty/ snobby teammate, oh you bet the state is going to enable their bad behavior. They pay isn't bad but then again the pay is not enough dealing with all the work load that they throw on you plus your toxic co-workers. And if your supervisor is toxic, you're screwed, they will make your life at work a dumpster fire. EAU is like the middle child, no one has time to help but everyone has the time to throw all the random work at you. The "flex" time they offer isn't really a flex. They only allow 2 hours per week to modify and flex your work schedule if you need it for appointments, etc., which isn't really helpful at all. The hybrid schedule is nice but it's not nice enough when you're in a terrible work environment. 
I wouldn't recommend this job to anyone, not even as a "get your foot in the door" type of job. 

I was a Correctional Officer for two years and was forced for overtime multiple days in a row and averaged at least two a week throughout my time there. The job instead isn’t bad but when you combined terrible management that micromanaged your every move and being forced for overtime it becomes a miserable job that you just dread of going to day in and day out. The pay for the position is a lot lower than what local gigs offer and the staff turnover is just plain ridiculous. While I was there I saw well more than 100 employees leave, transfer or be terminated. Lastly, they expect you to be a social worker instead of a Correctional Officer, which is just crazy. Jobs not worth the stress and all the family time you will miss. And I can’t say it ENOUGH the supervisors were some of THE worst I’d ever seen. Literally violate policy in front of you and then turn around and conduct an internal investigation on someone doing exactly what they did. Condescending hypocrites.

Never knowing if you have a job the next time you go into work. If an Inmate complains about you, you get investigated whether they are lying or not. When you try to treat the inmates as human beings you are told numerous times "they are inmates,prisoners, they deserve this" not allowed to talk to inmates or treat them with respect. If you do, they say you are fraternizing. They have the ability to fire you anytime for any reason within the first six months if they don't like you. I'm bitter because I did my job, I showed up for work everyday and I worked and sweat everyday. I never broke any rules and I did my very best, but always came home with a stressful headache. If you like your family life, stay away from this job. You have no family with this job other than the white shirts who think they own you. They tell you about advancement in the academy, but there isn't any. when you report to your job they tell you to forget everything you learned at the academy. Poor leadership, poor training, poor attitudes. Not a job for people with a heart.

It is and can be a very rough and stressful environment to work in.  Most of the people I worked with were very professional and good at their job.  After the loss of the union, it became even more stressful because management could do whatever they pleased.  You were only scheduled for 8 hours per day, but you often were forced into working an additional 8 hours like it or not.  Vacation time is great, but the sick days were cut to almost nothing.  Some overtime pay was unfair.  Example being if you were to use a sick day, or vacation day anytime before or after working overtime in the same week you would only be paid at your regular hourly rate instead of time and a half.  It was meant to deter people having volunteered to work overtime, and getting paid a premium rate, from taking a sick day to rest afterwards.  Nice idea, but if you are unwillingly forced into overtime you could lose the premium rate for having used a vacation day sometime before or even having a prescheduled vacation day after it.

While the work is pretty remedial in nature (watching offenders doing normal "daily living", there are certain aspects of the day that will stretch your mental and physical capabilities). One must always be physically and mentally ready to respond when necessary. The people that you work with really make the tasks to be accomplished much more interesting to conduct. Management is typically cordial and do what they can to accommodate things within their minimal control. Many bureaucratic red tape policies, but much to be left to all levels of management and collaboration with supervisors is relatively simple.  In my humble opinion, the schedule is quite demanding as it requires 12 hour days / shifts, but in the end, there is mandatory overtime and things can be a bit cumbersome. Overall, the atmosphere is quite agreeable if you're looking for a stable career with a great group of people. Please just maintain professionalism and be sure not to be drawn into any unnecessary nonsense brought on by any of the offenders and always hold strong to your ethical and moral values. 

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Agent 21 salaries reported	$24.40 per hour
Registered nurse 6 salaries reported	$90,189 per year
Office assistant 10 salaries reported	$20.35 per hour
Social worker 2 salaries reported	$34.33 per hour
Correctional officer 1 salary reported	$21.39 per hour

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