Improving Wellness Support for Institutional Corrections Employees

The Comprehensive Corrections Training and Technical Assistance Program provides comprehensive and high quality training and technical assistance (TTA) to BJA’s grantees and criminal justice practitioners to improve the delivery of correctional services and increase public safety by improving outcomes for people detained and incarcerated in correctional facilities.

Through this category the TTA provider will conduct a national scan of corrections academy and in-service trainings and develop recommendations and resources that will help institutional corrections agencies better support the retention and wellness of correctional employees. The field of corrections increasingly recognizes its critical role in helping prepare incarcerated individuals for successful reentry and reintegration into society; however, in order to fulfill that critical role, correctional employees need adequate support.

The objectives of this award are as follows: conduct a national scan of state corrections agencies regarding current practices in place through training academies and in-service training to address correctional employees’ needs related to wellness, retention, and job satisfaction, identify high quality curricula and gaps in available resources to support officer wellness, and develop guidance around what works to improve correctional officer wellness.

The American Correctional Association will use award funds to conduct a national scan of correctional agencies and their employee wellness resources and use scan results to develop appropriate tools targeted towards identified program gaps. Key players in this proposal include delegates from the American Correctional Association, the University of California – Berkeley, and stakeholders in the correctional field.

CA/NCF