HARLAN RICHARDS
July 19, 2018

YOU'RE FIRED!
SCI Security Director Eliminates All Clerk Positions

On July 9, 2018, Security Director Achterberg issued a memo stating, "For security reasons effective immediately all inmate clerk positions are being eliminated." He went on to add other details, such as granting current clerks 30 additional days of pay while they sought other employment and waiving the usual 90 day waiting period to apply for another job after getting fired. So all in all, it was a fairly humane way to implement his decision.

The problem lies in the decision itself and the reason for the decision. Recently, there were a number of cellphones found in the prison, a rarity in a Wisconsin prison. The phones were smuggled in with the collusion of a minimum security prisoner working outside the fence and one or more prisoners working inside the prison. The way the scheme worked was that the minimum security prisoner had cellphones sent to himself via UPS and then hid the packages from staff when they arrived. He sold the phones and hid them in janitorial supplies, which were delivered to the prison. The buyers received the phone from the supplies. This came to light when a cellphone charger was found mixed in with the cords for the trimmers in one of the prison barber shops.

What would cause any staff member to permit unsupervised prisoners to accept UPS packages at a minimum security prison? A modicum of common sense would have told any rational person that you don't turn a security screening function over to a prisoner. How many drugs or weapons were smuggled in as well? I wonder...

But getting back to the elimination of all inside clerk positions, what kind of sense does that make? What about the staff who should have been supervising the minimum security prisoners? The problem was outside the fence, not inside.

Apparently, the security director felt he had to make a statement. His abrupt elimination of all clerk positions created pandemonium everywhere. The broad language of his memo eliminated all the chapel clerks, hobby clerks, program clerks, and education clerks. It also should have eliminated all the library clerks, canteen clerks, laundry clerks, and kitchen clerks. Inexplicably, those clerks remained while the others were fired. What makes this even more baffling is that there is a custodian working in the property department who also orders supplies who kept his job because the word "clerk" was not in his job title.

The clerks do all the tedious paper shuffling which enables the prison to operate smoothly. In all the departments where clerks were eliminated, the staff are frantically rewriting job descriptions and job titles to get their clerks back under a different title doing essentially the same job. In my opinion, this is an exercise in idiocy.

What amazes me more than anything is that any rational person can see that what the security director did was unnecessary and unworkable, yet not one staff member has come out publicly to condemn his actions.

This comes back to a blog post I wrote about groupthink. There is a consensus among all staff in positions of authority that they may not contradict or question any security policy implemented by any other staff member. To do so is to ruin any chance of promotion. Supervisory staff are never hired from outside. All are promoted from within and if they do not meet the litmus test imposed by the groupthink, they don't get promoted.

The way the DOC is run reminds me of Stanlist Russia or Kim Jun Un's current North Korea regime. Dissent is stifled and the only way to get ahead is to be in line with the party doctrine.

The recent elimination of all the clerk positions in SCI is just another example of a departmental culture twisted over the years into an illogical system whose only reason to exist is to self-perpetuate itself.