Order or Stability: The Role of Penal Administrators in the Transformation of Instability within Correctional Institution

ABSTRACT

Within unstable correctional institutions, inexperienced politically appointed penal administrators achieve order at the expense of stability. Order, defined as involuntary inmate compliance with prison norms, depends upon the appendages of formal and informal social controls. In contrast, stability is voluntary inmate conformity to prescribed prison objectives, realized through democratic, non-placating administrative mechanisms. Inexperienced penal administrators perceive order to be analogous to stability, thereby tolerating, supporting, and perpetuating chaotic correctional institutions. In introducing original scholarship to the correctional literature, I draw from decades of experience working as a correctional officer within unstable, zoo-like penal institutions. I describe the practical failure of emphasizing order over stability. Within the parameters of this inclusive correctional taxonomy, order, given its volatility, becomes a formidable, yet fragile fault line that can alter an institution’s social climate. Also discussed are the salutary effects embodied in participatory management; the criminogenic ramifications that manifest from our prisons’ weak, ineffective, and underwhelming disciplinary apparatuses encouraging inmates to offend the prison’s prohibitions; and the penological oversights of unscrupulous prison practices that stem from the intellectual failings of out-of-touch academics who are far removed from real-world correctional environments to offer viable solutions.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their patience and assistance with this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ I witnessed the succession of patently unfit penal administrators come and go while experiencing their imprudence. Their reign of shared incompetence brought a slew of work-related anomalies, creating a noxious correctional environment. The proliferation of such institutional incongruities has fluctuated from riots and hostage-taking to other immiserating episodes of lawlessness, such as inmates assaulting inmates, inmates assaulting staff, and staff assaulting inmates and staff as well.

² Highly apposite to this paper are the unprincipled appointments of commissionerships bestowed by governors to penal administrators without penal experience. Consider Florida’s former Correctional Commissioner Julie Jones’s (2014 to 2018) impromptu defense of her political appointment. “My fresh perspective will enable me to look for different ways to do things. I don’t have to be an expert [in corrections] in order to implement change management. I’m good at the people part, and I’m good at the budget part. Hence on getting the current employees that are working as hard as they can [have] the resources to do their jobs, I can do that” (quoted in Kam 2014: 3B). Elsewhere, in February 2020, Mississippi’s prison system ran amuck with over a dozen inmate deaths from suicide and homicide. This sequence of anomalies prompted Mississippi’s Correctional Commissioner Pelicia Hall, an attorney with no prior penal experience, to resign from her revered politically appointed position. Collica-Cox and Schulz (2020) revealed that 18% of the 50 state correctional commissioners were women. Casting such phenomena in quantitative terms, out of the universe of nine female state correctional commissioners, Jones and Hall failed to meet the threshold of correctional experience. In the most charitable terms, Commissioners Jones and Hall are an affront to administrative professionalism and the quintessential examples of the least qualified correctional commissioners that one can assemble.

³ In keeping with this line of thought, I seek to dispel misguided predispositions on the scope and severity of penal harshness. In doing so, we must separate the wheat from the chaff by moving beyond biased media representations and questionable penological literature as the traditional sources of correctional information. Toward this end, I defer to the unimpeachable disclosures put forth by Wilbert Rideau, a convicted murderer and award-winning inmate journalist held for 44 years at Louisiana State Penitentiary – the nation’s largest maximum-security prison. Positioned at an Archimedean point, Rideau debunks beguiled myths marred by peripheral groups (e.g., academics and media/interest/reform groups) in their descriptions of the prison milieu (cited in Gilson 2010). Rideau warns that through the convergence of distorted lenses, these outliers advance their agendas with strident falsehoods, essentializing prisons as places of unmitigated violence and oppressive punishment (cited in Gilson 2010). Intuitively, it is difficult to envision the employment and retention of low-paid staff – particularly women – in the throes of a dangerous and dystopian workplace, where they make up 40% of workers in some prisons (Collica-Cox and Schulz 2020). The time has come for academics and others of a similar ilk who surrendered vestiges of common sense to reevaluate the probative value of their prejudicial scholarship on the extent of punitiveness and mayhem as cast within unstable correctional institution. In a Foucault (2009: 20) sense, academics devoid of empirical observation within their reach operate in an imaginary black box (i.e., a superficial understanding of the internal and esoteric workings of the prison). As a palpable barrier, this black box becomes their Achilles’ heel.

⁴ As an alternative to the vicarious and deleterious effects from the oft-assumed prominence of the prison’s foreboding punitive milieu, compassionate therapeutic programs have become proxies for punitive measures and euphemisms for inmate appeasement. As an illustration, in a Delaware prison, mental health professionals baited insubordinate inmates with culinary treats from Dunkin’ Donuts, to partake in their therapeutic treatment programs (Cherry 2017). As many of my former correctional colleagues would argue, therapeutic programs are a collage of patently false inmate transformations – linked to a throwback in vogue with Robert Martinson’s (1974) “nothing works” era and in line with Lee and Stohr’s (2012: 100) “correctional quackery.” It is problematic to assume that correctional officers, under the tutelage of absentee scholars, will align with academic (pedagogical) ventures. Correctional officers harbor deep suspicions toward trial-and-error programs and other growing academic arrangements (academic/penal administrator partnerships) that can jeopardize their safety and infringe upon institutional security. It has recently been suggested that academic interests in prisons go as far as prioritizing publication in academic journals (LaVigne 2022: 15), while bypassing the humanistic considerations of its actors – staff and inmates.

⁵ Parenthetically, as a matter of interest and relevant to this discussion are other impassioned unpleasantries percolating outside of judicial protocol. Inmates are reduced to their lowest common denominator by penal staff via coded language and reviled microaggressions of hate, disgust, and contempt (Jeffreys 2018). These dehumanizing mortifications are assaults on an inmate’s sense of self (Goffman 1961). However, most inmates view these psychologically injurious acts as inconsequential, even though they extend beyond a prisons’ core legal mandate where offenders are sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment (Dolovich 2009).

⁶ Positive change can be accomplished through the creation of a dedicated training and observational oversight team to teach inexperienced penal administrators on how to run the prison as an inmate-inclusive democratic system; providing a formalized system of education to prepare new incoming penal administrators to constructively address and find viable solutions to inmate problems. This body of organization then can assess the candidates’ performance in successfully implementing new remedial changes against the prior order-focused (“carrot-and-stick”) administrative methods of appeasement and punishment – henceforth the control group. This controlled experiment, through on-the-job observations by nonpartisan observers, focuses on the resulting impact that an administrative driven inmate-inclusive democratic system has on achieving a social climate that favor the goals of long-term stability, as opposed to a fragile and tenuous short-term order.

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Salvatore Cerrato

Salvatore Cerrato worked at the Essex County Jail (Newark, New Jersey) as a correctional officer for 25 years and a certified corrections (GED) teacher for 9 years at the Sarasota County Jail (Sarasota, Florida). His research interest include correctional administration and correctional institutions. His work has been published in Contemporary Justice Review, the Justice Professional. Criminal Justice Review, and in the Journal of Federal Probation.