Chicago Beyond rethought jails and prisons by tackling trauma
In 2018, I retired as the warden of the Cook County jail in Chicago. During my tenure as warden, the jail ended a seven-year consent decree with the Department of Justice that charged the jail with inadequately protecting people incarcerated from physical harm. The kinds of harm included excessive uses of force by officers against those incarcerated, violence between people incarcerated, inadequate medical and mental healthcare that included suicide prevention, inadequate fire safety measures and sanitation deficiencies. The court lifted the decree because the jail had met — and exceeded — its provisions by effecting a complete overhaul of everything from security and grievance procedures to healthcare, food service, laundry and environmental safety.
I was appointed the chief psychologist of the jail just three months after the consent decree was filed in 2010, and I was overwhelmed by the problem that was before us. Many of the jail’s policies and practices were demoralizing and dehumanizing at that time, and we justified that they were necessary for safety. The reality was that even with the strictest of security practices, people incarcerated and staff were still assaulting each other and people from both groups were dying by suicide to escape it all. In 2015, I was appointed the warden of the jail. At that time, major shifts to policies and practices had been made, but violence remained a significant issue. It wasn’t until we broke through the silos that existed between security and healthcare within the jail and between the jail and the larger criminal justice system that we began to experience some sustained progress. The greatest reprieve from the violence within the jail occurred when the courts made bail reforms that significantly reduced the number of people coming into the jail and when they moved cases along that had been in pre-trial status for years. By safely reducing the demand on the jail, our criminal justice system partners provided opportunities for the jail’s reforms to take root.
The federal judge who oversaw the consent decree deemed the Cook County jail a model correctional facility. Exceeding the terms of the decree marked the first time in 40 years that the jail was not under federal monitoring. That achievement required an unwavering focus on transformative change. It required the jail’s leadership team to work with the correctional staff and the people incarcerated within the jail — not for them, and certainly not against them. It also required a heightened focus on safety factors that extended beyond physical safety, doubling down on the emotional wellness of staff and people incarcerated. And finally, it required a level of transparency, allowing expertise from outside to help guide the policy and practice changes that were necessary.
The greatest reprieve from the violence within the jail occurred when the courts made bail reforms that significantly reduced the number of people coming into the jail and when they moved cases along that had been in pre-trial status for years.
This last point was crucial. Foundationally, our leadership team had to acknowledge that we could not and should not shoulder the burden of change alone. We had to open ourselves up to working with partners from inside and outside of the jail. This included our staff, people incarcerated in the system, healthcare experts from the jail and the community, justice system partners and justice reform experts from across the country. Together, we were able to achieve things that none of us could have made happen by ourselves.
Nationwide, jails and prisons are experiencing critical staffing shortages and life-threatening challenges to the safety of staff and people incarcerated within them. Because of this, correctional administrators are searching for ways they can make significant reforms. To do so, they must first identify the root of the issues they are facing.
The root of the problem
As a trained clinical psychologist who has spent the last 20 years examining the impact of incarceration on people, a former correctional staff person, a former jail leader, and as the wife of a correctional officer and the daughter of a person formerly incarcerated, I can tell you that a profound level of trauma exists throughout most jails and prisons, and that trauma is the primary root cause of much of the culture that exists within these systems.
Trauma is most often understood as an event that a person experiences or witnesses that is perceived as life-threatening or harmful and that has lasting effects on the person’s mental, emotional, physical, spiritual and social well-being. To this understanding of trauma, we must add the reality that our jails and prisons are themselves traumatizing. The negative effects of this system are experienced by both staff and the people who are incarcerated, as well as their families, leading to low life expectancy rates, high rates of physical and mental disease, violence and hopelessness.
Whether a person works in or is confined to a jail or prison, they are forced to always be hypervigilant, because a failure to do so can result in serious injury or death. This constant state of survival mode wears on the body in remarkable ways and is the reason that correctional staff have a life expectancy that is 20 years less than people in the public and that people incarcerated lose two years of life for every year they are incarcerated.
The profound levels of trauma that exist within jails and prisons require administrators to consider ways they can ensure people’s psychological safety as well as their physical safety, helping people to feel safe in addition to being safe. Psychological safety is only achieved through an intentional focus on the wellness of both key stakeholder groups — staff and people incarcerated.
A profound level of trauma exists throughout most jails and prisons, and that trauma is the primary root cause of much of the culture that exists within these systems.
A solution
When I retired from corrections, I started working at Chicago Beyond, a national philanthropic organization that addresses systemic inequity by backing solutions led by the people closest to the issues. One of those issues is justice. For the last two years, we have partnered with former correctional staff and union leaders, people formerly incarcerated and correctional administrators to support systemic change in jails and prisons across the country. Using Chicago Beyond’s Holistic Safety Framework and corresponding inventory, we help jail and prison administrators to assess the level of physical, emotional and interpersonal isolation that exists in their facilities. We then support the administrators as they engage in meaningful discussions with their staff and people incarcerated about safety and wellness.
When people feel they are valued, they are more likely to engage with themselves and other people in healthy ways, and this style of interaction yields greater physical safety. These discussions increase understanding among all groups and allow space for connection between them. We then collaborate with administrators to identify ways to connect their staff and people incarcerated to the resources articulated in those discussions. We then unearth ways that their recommendations can guide policy and practice reforms in the system, centering the health and wellness of both groups.
Our goal is to create an environment where staff and people incarcerated in the jail or prison share the responsibility of implementing and supporting the reforms with them, building trust across the groups. A last step in this collaborative approach to correctional operations encourages administrators to obtain ongoing feedback on the changes from individuals in the facility.
The idea of correctional administrators partnering with their staff and people incarcerated in their system to solve operational issues is not easy and is often met with trepidation, because it represents a significant shift in the paramilitary structure that most jails and prisons operate under. The historical structure of jails is what has prevented change to be systemic and sustained, because it requires everything to flow from one person. But in my experience, top-down change is ineffective and fleeting.
When I took over as the warden of Cook County jail, I had to navigate the very same problems that every warden before me had to navigate, because when they left, the new policies, practices and programs they implemented often went with them. Every new administrator had to come in with a new agenda. The stop and start impact of that kind of leadership doesn’t leave room for a baton pass and doesn’t allow promising reforms to seep into the layers of leadership within the jail. Time and time again, the paramilitary structure of corrections cripples administrators and undermines any legacy of change.
In Chicago Beyond’s work in jails and prisons, we have found that administrators, staff and people incarcerated struggle to talk with each other as partners. Instead, they talk to each other in a hierarchical way that leaves no space for working together. When administrators, staff and people incarcerated overcome the novelty of that type of interaction, they experience tremendous benefits. They report feeling “heard,” feeling more connected with people with similar experiences and feeling safer because they understand they are not in the fight for change alone.
They also come to realize that the fight for change is better won strategically by working together. When the process works, it does so because no one group is forced to work alone or against the other groups. This kind of change is built on an acknowledgment that both staff and people incarcerated experience shared harms in the correctional system and must have shared healing — and that they all deserve better than what the system is currently giving them. It is this kind of collectivism that is required for jail and prison reform to be both systemic and sustainable.