ACU Faces Down ACA
“Don’t mess with Texas” may be the rallying cry for natives of the Lone Star State, but ACU members have served notice that they won’t back down from anyone — including the American Corrections Association (ACA).
In August, several ACU leaders attended the ACA business symposium in San Antonio after the trade association rejected an anti-privatization advertisement in its convention program (see the Summer 2000 issue of ACU newsletter). An ACA senior sales manager says the AFSCME-sponsored ad was pulled because it might offend other advertisers.
“They kind of did us a favor by not running our ad because we got a lot more exposure this way than we would have if we had just stuck an ad in their program,” says Darrell Robertson, an ACU National Steering Committee member. He helped man a booth on the ACA convention floor.
AFSCME Council 7 in Texas used the event to inform the public about the plight of COs in the state. A candlelight vigil was held at the Samuel Gompers statue, not far from the convention site. “We gave recognition to correctional officers who lost their lives in the last year,” says Brian Olsen, Council 7 deputy director. “We also wanted to bring attention to what’s happening here in Texas, and to the lack of attention we think we’ve gotten from [Gov.] George Bush.”
Ever since the December 1999 death of CO3 Daniel Nagle, president of AFSCME Local 3890 in Texas, Council 7 has held candlelight vigils at every correctional facility – more than 100 – in the state. The council also has met with several lawmakers to discuss pay and staffing issues. The corrections department is undermanned by 2,000 COs, and although Texas has the nation’s second-largest state prison system, it ranks 46th in pay.
As an ACU National Steering Committee member, Robertson, president of Illinois Local 3653 (Council 31) at Taylorville Correctional Center, and his comrades have been working to combat the privatization of prisons. He says wardens and other prison officials who stopped at AFSCME’s display at the ACA convention “definitely agreed with us that privatization is not the way to go.”
The ACU booth, which stood among a sea of booths operated by private-prison entrepreneurs, featured a huge display showing the rejected ad. It encouraged support of H.R. 979, AFSCME’s anti-prison-privatization bill.
For years, ACU has been working diligently to alert Texans to the perils of privatization. Of ACU’s presence at the ACA Convention, Robertson says: “Whether people wanted us there or not, they definitely knew that we were there and why.
“For a while, I felt like nobody was really paying attention to us – that they didn’t take the privatization thing seriously because it was only happening in Texas and Florida,” Robertson says of ACU’s nationwide agenda. “But I think it’s becoming more and more of a big issue, especially with the exposure of private prisons on news shows like ‘20/20’ and ‘60 Minutes II.’ That’s done nothing but help us and bring a lot of attention to the issue.”
Council 7 leaders are shaking things up in Texas. When they requested the governor call a special legislative session to address pay and staffing issues for COs, they were ignored. But their tireless efforts have paid dividends. Recently, Bush, seeking to broaden his appeal as the Republican Presidential nominee, signed an executive order that reclassified the job description of CO3s, senior correctional officers. The result: a $1,600 annual pay increase.
“We think the union was directly responsible for putting the pressure on [Bush] to get it done,” says Olsen. “Both the Democratic and Republican parties here in Texas have put it in their platform to address the issues of correctional officers and their pay. They’ve made it a point to say that they were going to be pushing this in the next legislative session in January 2001. We’ll be marching and raising hell like we have up to now.”
That’s not all. The council has just started a major organizing and legislative campaign called “Professional Respect Now.”
The council will be organizing COs in state penitentiaries and promoting voter registration. Says Olsen: “We’re going to go out and show people what we must do to get the pay raises, training and equipment we need, and get them to unite under one banner” — that of ACU.
