Md. settlement for underpaying correctional officers jumps to $23M

ANNAPOLIS — Maryland’s settlement with thousands of current and former correctional employees improperly compensated for overtime work increased to roughly $23 million on Wednesday.

Gov. Wes Moore said the latest payment closes a yearslong investigation into alleged wage theft from nearly 6,000 employees in the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, which has also struggled with worker shortages at correctional institutions.

After last year approving about $13 million in back pay for correctional officers for the unpaid hours they worked between 2018 and 2021, the Board of Public Works on Wednesday approved another $9.5 million.

Union leaders thanked the Moore administration for working with them to make state employees whole after years of having their timecards tampered with, but they continued calls for accountability.

“It’s a disservice to the taxpayers, it’s a disservice to the employees that no one has been held accountable for this wage theft,” AFSCME Maryland Council 3 President Patrick Moran said during the board’s meeting.

Moran, whose union represents about 45,000 public employees, including the state’s correctional officers, repeatedly called out the administration of former Gov. Larry Hogan — now a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate — and accused former officials of orchestrating systematic wage theft in the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services.

Hogan and AFSCME have long had a contentious relationship, and a spokesman for the former governor has said the union’s leaders have remained “weirdly obsessed” with him since he left office.

Claims for unpaid wages arose from a Department of Labor investigation that began in November 2020.

After finding that the state owed roughly $470,000 in unpaid wages to officers at the maximum-security Jessup Correctional Institution, the Department of Labor expanded its investigation to the rest of the state’s 19 correctional facilities.

In July, the Board of Public Works approved back pay for nearly 3,900 current and former correctional officers, and the state and the U.S. Department of Labor were expected to investigate whether more employees in the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services were eligible to claim unpaid wages.

Carolyn Scruggs, secretary of the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, said Wednesday that the state expanded its investigation to include correctional employees with dietary, maintenance and supply jobs.

“We saw from the previous settlement that we had that we needed to go back and look at all classifications that had the word ‘correctional’ in it,” Scruggs said during the board’s meeting.

Final settlement amounts for individual employees will depend on how their hours were adjusted up or down and when they punched in or out on their timecards, according to AFSCME.

The Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services is also working with union leaders to establish a new overtime policy.

“Somewhere along the way, someone thought they could steal a couple minutes of our time here and a couple of minutes there, but it adds up,” Shane Wolford, a maintenance correction officer at the North Branch Correctional Institution in Cumberland, said in a statement.