MCOFU gets its way: $2,500 bonus for every guard wearing a body camera

The Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union (MCOFU) website has a new agreement on the Use of Body Worn Cameras in which the DOC which will pay officers a one-time bonus of $2,500 each if they have to wear a camera.

According to the 2022 report on staffing expenditures by Gordon Haas, there are 2,911 security personnel. (Security personnel to incarcerated person: 1:2.1)

If 2,000 security personnel wear body cameras at $2,500 each, the total expenditures would be $5 million dollars.

To put that in context, in 2022 ALL programs costs were $2,252,770.

http://www.realcostofprisons.org/writing/haas-expenditures-and-staffing-levels-for-2022.pdf

And according to a Boston Globe editorial (Sept. 28, 2023, "Another overtime scandal”), “[the] department’s overtime budget routinely tops $60 million a year, with more than two dozen correction officers getting more than $100,000 in overtime alone each year."  This in a DOC where the number of people incarcerated is decreasing every year.

via Lois Ahrens of The Real Cost of Prisons Project