Welcome to the PrisonCare Podcast!
I’m Sabrina Justison, founder of PrisonCare.org, equipping compassionate people to support the often-invisible people groups who make up a prison neighborhood - the inmate residents, correctional officers, staff, administration, and the families of all of these folks.
Join me for this week’s episode, and be encouraged to think, care, and respond as we explore the challenges facing prison neighborhoods everywhere.
Let’s support positive prison culture from the outside, because EVERYone on the inside matters.
http://prisoncare.org/community.html
Learn more about PrisonCare, Inc. and donate to our work
Time Markers:
1:28 A Much Larger Picture, An Important Time in History
3:43 A Looming, Industry-Wide Problem
5:22 Resources for Research — All the Good Pie Charts
6:54 Simple Math, Recruitment, and a Look at the Workplace Environment
9:34 How About All of the Other Perks, Though?
11:42 Retention is Approaching Crisis Status, and Corrections Fatigue is Real
15:15 Literally Taking Years Off of Your Life
16:46 What Does PrisonCare, Inc. Have to do With Big Stuff Like This??
20:12 The SHARED Goals
21:05 The Ways That PrisonCare, Inc. is Casting Vision for Policy Makers
Intro/Outro MUSIC CREDIT:
We've Come A Long Way (No Vocal Version)
Exzel Music Publishing (freemusicpublicdomain.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
===========
Hello, friends! Sabrina here. If you are new to the podcast, welcome! Today’s episode is an especially good one for new listeners as well as established friends.
So much of what I typically share with you on the podcast focuses on personal stories — the stories of people who are incarcerated, the stories of people like me, compassionate friends outside the razor wire, the stories of daily life in a particular prison, the stories of individuals or teams on the outside who choose to adopt a prison and offer care — and all of those stories are true.
(1:28)
But there is a much larger picture as well. There is a grander scale on which there is a need for care in prison neighborhoods, and recently it came to my attention that I haven’t shared in depth about that larger scale yet on the podcast. I was having coffee with a friend, someone newer to PrisonCare, and he asked me this question: “Sabrina, you talk with such confidence about the fact that the time is NOW for PrisonCare. That the pieces are in place for PrisonCare to make a powerful impact. Why? Why are you so sure that this is such an important time?”
I answered him with what I’m going to now share with you, and he listened intently. When I was finished, he said, “Okay. I get it now. You’re right. Wow…this is the moment!”
So today, I want to cast a little vision for the big picture, for what PrisonCare is more fully here for long-term, and for why YOU and every other compassionate person who is listening will agree that there is an urgent need that we must help meet. The stakes are high. The need is urgent. The time is now.
I often say that if ONE person receiving care from the outside doesn’t count, we’re doing the math wrong. And I stand by that belief and will continue to say it over and over. Each letter I write as a pen pal encourager is worth every moment it took to write, every bit of emotional energy it required. Everyone on the inside matters.
One prison neighborhood adopted by one compassion team — or even adopted by one person — is filled with individuals whose lives can be impacted for the better by the support of a more positive culture inside their facility. Encouragement in the form of relationships through letters. Resources in the form of mental wellness information to improve health. Inspiration in the form of virtues based language that models and coaches people on the inside to live with respect for themselves and others, regardless of the uniform anyone wears. Each individual matters.
(3:43)
But at the same time, most of us outside the system are oblivious to the looming problem in our nation’s prison system as a whole, and unaware of the urgent need for PrisonCare at this moment in history.
Simply put, the type of prison system the United States has been perpetuating for the last 100+ years doesn’t work because it isn’t sustainable.
Let that sink in for a minute, especially if you are afraid I’m going to talk about abolition now, or early release for drug offenders, or some other partisan issue, because that is NOT where I am going. I’m not saying it doesn’t work because prisons are fundamentally a bad approach and should be abolished. I’m not saying it doesn’t work because too many people are incarcerated, period, and many should be released. I’m not saying it doesn’t work because they are not offering rehabilitative opportunities that will reduce recidivism.
There is a great deal of truth to be explored in all of those partisan ideas, but that’s not for today’s episode. In general, that’s not for PrisonCare to explore at all. Let me say it again, so that we are very clear.
The type of prison system the United States has been perpetuating for the last 100+ years doesn’t work because it isn’t sustainable.
It isn’t sustainable. The fact that it’s made it this long does not mean it can keep going indefinitely. It’s approaching its terminus. This U.S. prison system is not sustainable.
(5:22)
There are wonderful references you can explore if you like data, and pie charts, and graphs, and stats. Bureau of Justice statistics at bjs.ojp.gov collects all sorts of information from all over the country every year. PrisonPolicy.org and The Marshall Project and The Sentencing Project are organizations providing excellent research resources. I’ll drop links into the show notes for you.
But I’m an average person speaking about the practical that I observe and am learning to make sense of, so I’ll leave it to you to do your homework if you want the data for your own analysis and evaluation.
Simply put, the U.S. incarcerates a LOT of people. There were close to 2 million individuals in jails, prisons, juvenile, and immigration facilities in 2022. The U.S. is the most highly incarcerated country in the world.
Those prisons require corrections professionals to run them. If you lock people up, you have to provide for their custody, care and control, and that’s what correctional officers, case managers, and prison administrators are paid to do.
The more people you have serving prison sentences, the more corrections staff you need to provide custody, care and control.
I am terrible at word problems in math, but even I understand that the more prisoners, the more prison staff you need, right?
And herein lies the problem: the workplace environment is SO TOXIC inside a prison that it is becoming more and more difficult to recruit and retain correctional officers.
(6:54)
Recruitment is a tough sell, because corrections is a tough field. You can talk up the positive elements all day long, and still come away convinced that it’s a tough field to work in. So getting people to choose this tough field requires perks to make it attractive — things like high salaries, excellent benefits, opportunities for advancement, elite leadership from supervisors, 5 weeks paid vacation a year, rich continuing education opportunities, etc.
Well, Corrections includes almost none of these attractive perks. The national average for CO pay in 2022 was $48,000.00 a year. You can raise a family on that salary, especially since many of the CO jobs are in state Dept. of Corrections facilities, so the health benefits are good. It’s not a salary to be looked down upon.
But put it up against other jobs that make a similar salary without a college degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2022 (reliable source, right?). $48,000.00, you can make a salary like that in: top tiers of retail management, manufacturing (often offering on the job training), skilled trades for which training is often affordable, sanitation supervision in commercial facilities, and for the entrepreneurial types with some computer savvy, digital marketing or online transcription. That’s just a small sampling.
The benefits are likely not as good in those positions, but think about the trade-off, the decrease in danger alone. Correctional Officers walk into every single shift with a legitimate threat of bodily harm. And on the shifts where they are not jumped, they are exposed to violence by one prison inmate against another, to the witnessing of self-harm by people who are incarcerated and failing mentally, to overt hatred from many of the 100+ incarcerated people surrounding them on the tier, the throwing of bodily fluids at them in protest against prison conditions, and more.
(9:34)
To make it worse, those other benefits that we would hope for in a job this tough are very hard to find. As far as leadership goes, prison administration is notoriously unsupportive of COs’ needs and requests. Time off for family, travel, and personal interests is hugely problematic. You not only don’t get that 5 weeks paid vacation each year, you work shifts with unpredictable, long hours and frequent mandatory overtime.
How about moving up in the corporation? Yeah! There are opportunities for advancement, but none of them remove you from the toxic environment of your workplace. You’ll still be in the prison environment, which is at the heart of this tough situation.
Racial tensions within prisons can be tremendously challenging. With people of color currently being incarcerated at 5 times the rate of white people, and with almost 60% of Correctional Officers in the U.S. being white, and with many prisons being built in rural areas away from racially diverse cities, you can imagine that racial tension often runs high.
Continuing education is spotty at best — heck, the initial education you get in the corrections academy at the time of your hire is on average only 8-12 weeks long, with some states offering a terrifyingly short 2 or 3 weeks of training before you are moved into the facility to learn on the job.
But let’s imagine that someone feels drawn to work in Corrections, wants to be in a profession that serves society, likes the idea of challenge, etc. They are successfully recruited, and they now fill a needed position in a prison.
(11:42)
Excellent! Now you just have to keep them around.
Retention of correctional officers is approaching crisis status in the U.S. Let me give you this for context: in 2000, 23 years ago, a study found that the turnover rate in Corrections was what experts called “alarmingly high” at 16%. That means that 16% of the staff in a facility, on average, was leaving within a year, and new recruits were being brought in and trained to take their places. 16% of your staff at any given time would therefore be inexperienced. That was an alarmingly high 16% turnover rate in 2000.
In 2022, the turnover rate on average was 30%. 30% of correctional officers are leaving — quitting or retiring — and new recruits must be found and trained to take their places. In some prisons, it is MUCH higher than that. In one private prison I studied in 2021, their turnover rate was 107%. Think about that for a moment. The staff bearing the responsibility for the custody, care and control of approximately 1800 prison residents was experiencing a 107% turnover rather that year.
Many prisons are now reporting vacancy rates as high as 50%. That means they are running with half the staff they need. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that in the U.S. there will be a need to hire 33,000 correctional officers each year for the next ten years.
Why aren’t people eager to spend their whole career in Corrections? Ten years ago or so, a new term was coined to explain it: Corrections Fatigue. Corrections Fatigue refers to the Post Traumatic Stress - type symptoms that correctional officers almost universally experience after only a short time on the job. Hypervigilance. Trouble sleeping. Intrusive, unpleasant thoughts or memories. Panic attacks. Emotional numbness. Feelings of helplessness. Difficulty controlling anger.
Desert Waters, a brilliant non-profit organization out of Colorado, under the direction of Dr. Caterina Spinaris, defines corrections fatigue as “cumulative negative changes of corrections staff's personality, health and functioning, and of the corrections workplace culture”.
A “cumulative negative change of corrections staff's personality, health and functioning, and of the corrections workplace culture”. Another brilliant organization, One Voice United, is bringing correctional officers together to speak the truth, and to have each other’s six while they do it, educating our nation’s legislators and the world at large about the realities of a life spent working in corrections. Again, links are in the show notes to these organizations so that you can learn more about their tremendous work.
(15:15)
The reason retention is a problem for corrections officers is because of what the job, the environment in the workplace as well as the specific dangers associated with their work, makes them sick, physically, mentally, emotionally, and relationally.
The average life expectancy for someone who spends their career as a CO is … wait for it … 59 years old.
77 years old is the national average for people who do not work in corrections.
Do you think the new recruits sign a document at hiring, agreeing to trade 18 years of their life for the job?
On average, correctional officers who work their whole career as COs and then retire will live for only 18 more months after retirement. Can you imagine that? Some die from unmanaged physical conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease or stroke. Sadly, some die from suicide. A staggering number of COs - currently employed or retired from the field - are victims of suicide.
The divorce rate among COs is terrible, as is the rate of alcoholism.
When they say that Corrections is a tough job, they aren’t kidding.
(16:46)
Okay, so pull the focus back out a little wider again. In light of the tremendous challenge we find in recruiting AND retaining correctional officers, AND the high number of people who are incarcerated, serving prison sentences, a serious problem becomes evident.
If, 23 years ago, a 16% turnover rate was alarming, what should we wisely expect to happen in the next ten years when the 2022 average turnover rate was 30% or higher?
This system is not sustainable.
There are soon not going to be enough staff to provide custody, care and control for the people who are incarcerated.
There are already facilities operating at half-staff, which, to my mind, means there are already not enough staff to provide custody, care and control for the residents on their tiers.
And what are we doing, as a society, when we insist on perpetuating, propping up, and continuing within a system that is literally eating away the lives of the people willing to work in it? 18 years worth of life-expectancy being taken!
So, let’s bring it around to PrisonCare.
The need is clearly an urgent one. The prison system in the U.S. is not sustainable. It must change, and it must change SOON. Advocacy groups are working hard in Washington to make the changes at the legislative level, and I hope and pray that they are successful in finding specific solutions.
But why do I think that PrisonCare, and a bunch of pen pal encouragers, are a vital piece of the answer to this looming crisis in our prison system nationally?
Because equipping pen pal encouragers is not the only thing that PrisonCare. does. That’s how we started. That’s how *I* started! And that’s been the heart of The PrisonCare Podcast to this point, because it seemed to us that this was a great way to educate and raise up compassionate people who want to be a part of positive change, but don’t want to go inside the fence. A podcast is a great way to reach people like that, offering them tools and knowledge that helps them get involved.
But PrisonCare, Inc. is more broadly committed to raising awareness of the urgent need for a new system, and here’s the core of it: equipping the next generation of policy makers, corrections professionals, criminal justice practitioners, and law enforcement to catch the vision for a prison system that is not entrenched in an us vs. them mindset.
That’s the core of the PrisonCare model for advocacy, right? We’re not advocating for prisoners at the expense of corrections staff. And we’re not advocating for the staff at the expense of the residents. We see a prison as a neighborhood in which EVERY person is suffering because of the toxic environment our approach to corrections in the U.S. has created over the last century.
We believe in a fundamental change in paradigm.
No us. vs. them.
No zero-sum game.
One group does not have to lose for the other to win.
(20:12)
While there are obvious, distinct differences in the goals of prison residents and the goals of prison staff members, there are also shared goals.
Let me say it again. There are shared goals.
Residents and Staff alike want to be safe from violence.
COs and inmates both want to experience physical health.
People wearing both kinds of uniform want to be mentally well and experiencing personal growth and fulfillment.
All of the residents of the prison neighborhood, whether they are there voluntarily or not, want provision that will meet their needs.
Prison residents and prison staff members have shared goals.
(21:05)
So, what are we doing about it? How are we casting vision with the next generation of policy shapers? Well, part of what PrisonCare is doing connects us with universities, with student groups and with faculty, casting a vision for the development of a prison system model that is not based on us vs. them.
We’re not offering the framework for the model itself; that’s beyond the understanding and expertise that any of us here at PrisonCare have. But we want the folks who do have greater understanding and expertise, who will be the voices and hands creating the new system that will replace this soon-to-be obsolete prison system over the next few years, to become convinced that us vs. them is not serving anyone. It is the fundamental toxic element that must be removed. It is killing everyone inside a prison neighborhood.
So, I hope that you, like my friend at coffee the other day, are nodding your head, a light in your eyes, and you’re saying: “Okay. I get it now. You’re right. Wow…this is the moment!”
I hope you are thinking about the scope of the problem, and the heart of the solution. I wish I had all of the specifics for that solution figured out, all neat and tidy on paper, wrapped up with a bow, ready to present to Congress. But I don’t have a clue. I don’t have a criminal justice degree. I don’t have a wealth of experience in sociology, or years of observation inside the corrections industry.
What I have is a fundamental truth to share, one that must guide the folks with all that knowledge and experience that is not mine to offer. When we create a new system, it must be one that recognizes the shared goals and needs of everyone inside a prison neighborhood. It cannot be set up on an us vs. them principle. If our society must have prisons, they must be designed for the improvement, support, and rehabilitation of the people who are incarcerated there, AND they must be designed for the support, encouragement, and well-being of the people who are paid to work there.
If you’ve thought about being a financial supporter of PrisonCare in the past, but haven’t made a donation because it sounds like there’s little need…I mean, each compassion team is self-supporting, so the overhead for coordinating a non-profit like this one is low; that’s part of what we love about the PrisonCare Compassion Team model.
But I’m suggesting that you rethink your involvement financially. There is another whole layer to PrisonCare, Inc.’s work, a layer beyond what the podcast has shared in its first six months of episodes. As our reach is growing, we are being invited to more and more university settings where the bright minds that will be tasked with creating a new system in just a few short years need to be helped to understand, on a deep level, that “us vs. them” must be removed from the model.
As a society, we must care for everyone who exists in a prison neighborhood.
As the next generation studies and dreams and devises a plan, we must help them understand how much everyone on the inside matters.
And I’m just being real: traveling to campuses, presenting, sharing free resources, etc. gets expensive fast.
We’re working on creating more and more video resources online that will be accessible for free as time goes on, but that takes huge numbers of hours, so it’s a slow process.
And to be honest, there is no substitute for an in-person event where you interact with one another in real life. Travel to universities, conferences, and civic groups for live dialogue? That’s gonna be a continuing part of our rhythms at PrisonCare, Inc.
You see it now, don’t you?
The need- it’s urgent.
The national crisis in the industry is not far off.
The answer includes PrisonCare’s core tenet, that us vs. them serves no one well.
And you can help.
If you want to learn more, visit prisoncare.org, where you can learn lots about our 501(c)(3) tax exempt non-profit organization, what it’s doing, and how people all over the country (and, in fact, we’re beginning to get some international attention as well!) are linking arms to help. Consider investing in something you believe in, like PrisonCare. We’re equipping compassionate people to support positive prison culture, because everyone on the inside matters.
Thanks for thinking big picture with me, friends, and thanks for caring!
—————————
Thanks for listening to The PrisonCare Podcast. be sure to visit us at prisoncare.org. PrisonCare — Equipping compassionate people to support positive prison culture from the outside, because everyone on the inside matters.
http://prisoncare.org/community.html
Learn more about PrisonCare, Inc. and donate to our work
https://bjs.ojp.gov/
Bureau of Justice Statistics - Office of Justice Programs
https://themarshallproject.org
The Marshall Project - Nonprofit Journalism About Criminal Justice
https://sentencingproject.org
The Sentencing Project - Advocating for Effective and Humane Responses to Crime
https://prisonpolicy.org
Prison Policy Initiative - non-profit, non-partisan, producing cutting edge research about the broader harm of mass criminalization
https://desertwaters.com
Desert Waters Correctional Outreach
https://onevoiceunited.org/
One Voice Uniting Corrections
———————————
http://prisoncare.org/community.html
Learn more about PrisonCare, Inc. and donate to our work
Time Markers:
1:28 A Much Larger Picture, An Important Time in History
3:43 A Looming, Industry-Wide Problem
5:22 Resources for Research — All the Good Pie Charts
6:54 Simple Math, Recruitment, and a Look at the Workplace Environment
9:34 How About All of the Other Perks, Though?
11:42 Retention is Approaching Crisis Status, and Corrections Fatigue is Real
15:15 Literally Taking Years Off of Your Life
16:46 What Does PrisonCare, Inc. Have to do With Big Stuff Like This??
20:12 The SHARED Goals
21:05 The Ways That PrisonCare, Inc. is Casting Vision for Policy Makers
Intro/Outro MUSIC CREDIT:
We've Come A Long Way (No Vocal Version)
Exzel Music Publishing (freemusicpublicdomain.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/