Agency Leaders, Labor, and Advocates in Corrections Working Together to Transform Cultures, Climate, and Spaces in Corrections

Across the country, state Departments of Correction (DOCs) are in crisis, with unprecedented shortages of staffing resulting in negative impacts on the health and well-being of correctional officers and, in turn, detrimental impacts on climate and culture of the prisons designed to help rehabilitate incarcerated people across the county.
Whether state DOCs can substantially improve the health and well-being of staff and people incarcerated such that staff retention rates increase markedly depends on improvements to a prison’s climate – what people see, hear, and feel in that facility. Truly changing a prison’s climate requires transforming a department’s culture — norms, beliefs, assumptions, expectations, and values that drive how people think about and behave in their organizations. (Randish and Young, 2023)
Through this expansion of the existing cooperative agreement, the Keystone Restituere Justice Center, Inc (KRJC) will work to raise the visibility of this issue in ways directors cannot do themselves; get them data to understand the issue better in their state and help them problem solve; help them align their agency priorities with the staff they have; and make it easier to partner with staff and advocates.
To do this, during the second year of this cooperative agreement, KRJC will: 1) publish a state-by-state analysis of how DOC workforce trends in a given state compare to workforce trends in other agencies in their respective states; 2) develop a toolkit of national resources that will assist DOC leadership in states across the country to positively impact key issues that affect prison/jail staffing and culture; 3) provide states with individual training and technical assistance informing the convening of three regional meetings focused on measuring the health and safety and alignment of the CO workforce; 4) convene select state-based advocates representing people incarcerated to determine how they can best be best positioned to partner with DOC leaders in the “measurement” and “alignment” processes described above; 5) convene select state-based representatives of staff/unions to determine how they can best be best positioned to partner with DOC leaders in the “measurement” and “alignment” processes described above; and, 6) design and launch an 18-month learning community that will provide 4-6 states with the opportunity to learn from best practices and share and cross-pollinate ideas around the improvement of health and safety of people working and living in correctional facilities.