Audit: Calif. prison workers cheated on timesheets

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Dozens of employees at a California state prison were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for hours they didn't work during a three-month sampling period last year, according to an inspector general's report released Wednesday.

Auditors found that one mental health employee averaged less than 27 hours of his scheduled 40-hour work week inside Mule Creek State Prison, which is 40 miles southeast of the state capital. Teachers spent as few as 33 hours inside the prison, but were paid for a 40-hour week.

"Many of the prison's mental health and educational employees were fully paid, but did not average working full days inside the prison," wrote acting Inspector General Bruce Monfross.

Taxpayers paid $272,900 for time when the 66 employees were absent during the three-month sample period from June through August last year. That's a rate of nearly $1.1 million in overpayments each year at that prison alone. California, the nation's largest state prison system, has 33 adult prisons along with work camps and juvenile lockups.

Are these so called "working class" professionals the backbone of the middle class? To work in the prison system in California seems to be upper-class.