The California correctional officer salary scale starts at just over $3,000 per month for those enrolled in training and goes up to more than $6,000 per month at the top of the scale, making California the highest-paying state for this occupation in the United States.igures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wages survey shows California is the highest-paying state for correctional officers, employing 40,260 of them in 2008 at an annual mean wage of $63,230, which works out to about $5,270 per month or $30.40 per hour.