Delaware County prison officials issued questionable bonuses, records show
Delaware County prison officials seem to have broken their own rules for bonuses given to staff, as records show some employees of the George W. Hill Correctional Facility receiving thousands of dollars in bonuses even though they don’t appear to have met the criteria.
The questionable bonuses, which the county declined to explain, raise issues about whether the county was offering the extra money to all employees on an understandable and equitable basis, or whether politics and an element of “picking winning and losers” may have been at play.
The bonuses were part of the county’s efforts in 2022 to increase employee retention at the facility as the prison had just undergone a massive transition from being privately managed back to government managed.
The county declined to rehire dozens of correctional officers who previously worked for the private management outfit, the GEO group. It also began the arduous process of hiring its own prison staff for the first time in about three decades. Along with other new workplace rules it was instituting, the county began to deal with higher than normal turnover in a sector that already has difficulty attracting and retaining employees.
In July 2022, video from the Delaware County Jail Oversight Board shows new Warden Laura Williams explaining the “Employee Referral Bonus” to members of the board. Additionally, minutes from the September meeting of the board show the county was also offering a $2,000 retention bonus — usually split into two separate $1,000 awards — to new hires who hit certain benchmarks, the most important of which was staying on a certain length of time after the start date.
Yet a log of bonuses paid by the county obtained by a Right to Know request raises questions about who was paid — and how much.
The log is filled with hundreds of $1,000 entries as one would expect, but two other entries are conspicuous.
On two separate line-item entries, the county paid $5,000 to Lisa Mastroddi for a total of $10,000. Although the first name is redacted, the document must be referring to her because it lists Mastroddi’s position as “Deputy Warden of [Operations].”

Although she began her work at the prison in 2001, “Deputy Warden Lisa Mastroddi was appointed to her [management] position at the George W. Hill Correctional Facility (Delaware County Prison) in December 2021 to assist the facility during a period of transition to full county operation and management of the facility,” a county website says.
If Mastroddi was eligible for a retention bonus, then dozens of other management personnel would likely have qualified for $10,000 in bonus pay as well.
The records also show a $5,000 payment to Sarah Bowles, a compliance administrator who has worked at the facility for years.
Sources with intimate knowledge of the prison’s day-to-day operations say there are other questionable line items in the document that shows the county spent just shy of half a million dollars on the bonuses.
Without additional information from the county, the bonuses would be more of an indictment on the prison management, Jail Oversight Board, and the County Council, rather than the employees like Mastroddi and Bowles. Few if any employees would turn down a bonus if offered, but the county administration was the entity keenly aware that the money was only supposed to be paid out if certain criteria were met.
Broad + Liberty asked the county if there were other communications to employees of the GWHCF about potential bonuses outside of the referral and retention ones, already mentioned, such as possible performance bonuses. The county did not respond to that request for comment.
No data or documentation exists that would suggest any of the employees acted wrongly by accepting any of the bonuses shown in the log. The core issue is whether administrators held themselves to the approved guidelines for distributing the monies.
This new revelation comes just months after the county council was on the hot seat for introducing and then passing a 23 percent tax increase.
Nearly all of the Democrats who currently sit on the unanimously Democratic five-seat county council campaigned in the late 2010s on deprivatizing the prison, which happened in April 2022. Yet in the nearly three years that have passed, the budget has grown beyond expectation while at the same time the prison population has decreased.
The council’s latest budget shows the prison’s spending going from $53.4 million in 2023, up to $56.6 million in 2024, finally up to $59.3 million in 2025.
Todd Shepherd is Broad + Liberty’s chief investigative reporter. Send him tips at tshepherd@broadandliberty.com, or use his encrypted email at shepherdreports@protonmail.com. @shepherdreports
Don’t Philly my Delco!
Too late Pops. You gotta vote them out.