FAIRFIELD COUNTY – A media outlet announced last week that the Fairfield Detention Center “is on the hook to pay $1M in fines for staffing violations.”
County Administrator Vic Carpenter clarified that information, telling The Voice that the county has been fined $55,000, but not $1 million.
The S.C. Law Enforcement Training Council did, however, decide on Oct. 22 of this year to place the county under a two-year probation period for staffing violations.
“So if, during that two years, we don’t take care of business as we should, we could get some kind of fine,” Carpenter said. “Probably not a million dollars, though. I don’t think any county detention center in the state has ever gotten that kind of fine.
“If we get past two years with no problems, then there will be no fine at all,” Carpenter said.
It was reported that one Fairfield County corrections officer had been employed by the county for over two years without being certified.
Another six officers were said to have continued to be employed by the county after their certifications had expired due to their failure to undergo retraining.
“It’s just that their paperwork hadn’t been turned in,” Carpenter said. “I understand that’s mostly why we received the $55,000 fine. I have not received the actual documentation on any of this yet. When the county receives information in writing, we will have a better understanding of everything.
“These problems were mostly about paper work,” he said. “When we got right down to it, the county just had not filed employee paperwork correctly or in a timely fashion. Now the paper work has been filed for those individuals.
“We did have an officer not yet qualified, but he’s now enrolled in classes at the Criminal Justice Academy, so we’ve addressed all of those aspects already,” Carpenter said. “Until the officer completes the classes, he cannot serve in a law enforcement capacity. He can only carry out other duties in the detention center.
“So, we’re in compliance,” Carpenter said. He also said he plans to meet with law enforcement training council officials to appeal the jail’s probation and the proposed fine of up to $1 million.
On Dec. 1, the county announced steps it was taking to address longstanding staffing challenges at the detention center, largely driven by the competitiveness of starting salaries.
“State regulations require that we maintain certain levels of staffing and training at the detention center, and we are subject to compliance and oversight that is very strict,” Carpenter explained to The Voice following the Dec. 8 county council meeting. Carpenter said staffing levels at the detention center were a concern.
“To compound matters, in addition to having very few people even willing to apply for two long-vacant positions, we would regularly lose the ones we had to neighboring counties because of the significant difference in pay levels.”
In an effort to help the detention center meet the stiff state regulations, he announced the county would eliminate the two long-unfilled positions at the detention center and reinvest that savings directly into frontline staff, raising the starting salary for correctional officers from $38,208 to $43,418.
Carpenter said the deterioration of the county’s compliance at the detention center was mostly due to high levels of turnover in county leadership over the last few years.
“As a result, paperwork has frequently fallen through the cracks,” he said.
In the last four years, the county has operated under five different administrators and interim administrators, two different deputy administrators, and two different attorneys. Carpenter was hired less than a year ago.
“It’s not a situation where corrections officers did anything criminal or anything illegal, no indication of that at all. It’s been a lack of leadership, a lack of attention to details,” he said.
“But we’re fixing it,” Carpenter said.