Gov. Jerry Brown announced on Tuesday that the state will eliminate 400 jobs at California’s Department of Corrections headquarters in Sacramento. The state expects to save $30 million with those cuts.
In a written statement, Gov. Brown described the cuts as “long overdue.” Brown’s spokeswoman Elizabeth Ashford said California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation began to notify staff last week.
Ashford said the decision to cut department’s workforce has nothing to do with a federal court order that could shrink the state’s prisons by tens of thousands of inmates. Ashford said Corrections is cutting the positions to save $200 million in personnel costs this next fiscal year to help plug the state’s deficit. She says it makes sense for the department to start cutting from headquarters.
“It’s smaller, people have to take on more responsibility, but you do have the elimination of some senior positions that those numbers really do add up,” she said.
Corrections plans to cut 100 managers and supervisors and 32 executives from its staff in Sacramento. Those job reductions follow the elimination of 1,000 staff positions in headquarters in the last year and half. That’s a twenty-five percent reduction in the agency’s managerial workforce.
