84: The Role of Leadership in Preventing Misconduct in Correctional Facilities

Can leadership failures create a breeding ground for misconduct in correctional facilities?

In this episode of the Prison Officer Podcast, we confront this critical question head-on. Through the lens of Stanley Milgram's famous 1963 obedience study, we unravel the often unseen dynamics of authority in corrections, exploring when and how the duty to intervene should override blind obedience. Recent cases of systemic leadership breakdowns are scrutinized, revealing how these lapses can foster environments where illegal and immoral actions flourish. I discuss the emotional rollercoaster faced by both staff and inmates during crises and why intervention is as crucial as physical action in preventing escalation. 

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Chapters

• 0:36 Understanding Obedience in Corrections
• 12:50 Building Stronger Corrections Through Training

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:36

Well, hello and welcome back to the Prison Officer Podcast. Today I'm going to talk about duty to intervene and how that affects us in the correctional environment. But before I get to our topic today, I want to give a shout out to one of our sponsors, pepperball. And you know, during my 29 years of corrections, I've used Pepperball hundreds of times, whether it was for chemical dispersion or whether direct impact. I was able to solve a lot of use of force incidents during my time with Pepperball. It's so unique and it allows you so many options in the way that you can use the organic PAVA irritant. So if you'd like to learn more about Pepperball, go to wwwpepperballcom or you can find the link in today's show notes. And and thank you, pepper ball, for being a sponsor of the prison officer podcast. A lot of peas there, you know.

Speaker 1: 1:29

Recently, uh, the news has reported a lot of instances of multiple staff getting involved in misconduct in one form or another. I'm not going to throw out anybody's names or any institutions. You can look up on the internet and find it yourself. But recently there were five correctional officers on a search team who have been charged with murder and the death of an inmate at a male institution and, if you take a look, there's been three former correctional officers and one current officer arrested recently for allegedly using excessive force on an inmate, and another one is a female institution. And since 2021, there's been at least eight employees who've been charged with sexually abusing inmates at this institution. So what's causing that? Been charged with sexually abusing inmates at this institution? So what's causing that? What's causing you know, and some people are going to say, well, they're, they're, they're picking on people or whatever, but when you've got multiple staff standing there and uh, allowing, uh, an excessive use of force or sexual assault, what's going on there Is this culture. You know, I'm going to say that if you look around these facilities, you're going to see a whole lot of examples of leadership failures. That's where I'm going to put it. You know, both in admin and at the lower levels I'm not just picking on the wardens or the administrators you have leadership missing at multiple levels in these institutions. So how does you know your facility or worse, or agency get so distracted and removed from the job at hand? You know that you have many, not just one, many staff committing acts that are illegal, immoral or against policy.

Speaker 1: 3:23

You know, I was doing some research on this and there's an interesting research project that happened in 1963 by Stanley Milgram. He was a psychologist at Yale University and he carried out one of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology. And you can look all this up. It's on Wiki and all that stuff. I'm just going to go through it real quick and try to bring it to an understanding of what we're dealing with in corrections. So this is how it was set up.

Speaker 1: 3:55

He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Will a person override their personal conscience, their morals, their beliefs if an authority figure tells them to? And you know this went back to you know he was studying this after World War II, the Nuremberg War Trials and many of the defense for a lot of the people at the Nuremberg War Trials were they were just following orders and we've heard that before. And how far does that go? How far is it okay to just follow orders and corrections? We're talking military here. Corrections is still a very militaristic agencies, the way they're set up. You know we have rank at the top and we have rank down through there, whether it's wardens, captains, lieutenants, sergeants, whatever we're doing. So we're set up very militaristically. We take orders, do we not? So at what point is that? Do we take that too far?

Speaker 1: 5:05

So he set up an experiment here and the procedure was that the participants would be paired with another person and then they would draw lots to find out who would be the learner and who would be the teacher. And the draw was fixed. I mean, they didn't know it, the participant didn't know it, but the participant was always going to be picked as the teacher, right, and the learner was one of Milgram's students or whatever, and they would pretend to be a real participant and they would go over in a room and Milgram would walk the teacher in there, the participant, and they would hook them up to electrodes and all this stuff that was going to give them a shock. Okay, the electric shock generator. It had rows of switches that was marked all the way from 15 volts to 375 volts, and next to those it also said slight shock. Or it said danger, severe shock, which? 375 or 450 volts? That's a dangerous shock.

Speaker 1: 6:12

But the shocks in Milligram's obedience experiments were not real. The learners sitting in there strapped to the machine were actors. They were part of the experiment. They didn't actually receive any shocks, although they would scream out and yell and try to convince the people in the other room that they were in agony or pain. So the teachers though the real participants in the study believed that the shocks were real, and this is crucial for the experiment, because this is what's going to measure the obedience to authority figures, even when it's causing harm to others.

Speaker 1: 6:48

So they would get this set up, they would sit down and they would ask them test questions and I don't have the test questions. I don't know specifically what it was, if it was math or whatever but whenever they missed a test question, they had the teacher, which was the participant, hit a button that would give a shock to that person in the other room. The person in the other room, you know, with the first shocks, would, of course, go ow, and then, as it got louder, they would go ow, ow, ow. You know, at one point, if you went all the way to the top, they would start yelling about having a heart condition, right, and if you do this, it's going to kill me. Well, in the room with a participant is the people who are running the experiment, and they looked at them as an authority figure. That person who was running the experiment. You know, at first they would say well, just, you know, please continue, please continue. It's necessary for the experiment that we continue with this. So, as the actor missed more questions, they would shock him harder or thought they were, and the person in the room would say you know, the experiment requires you to continue. It's absolutely essential that you continue. And then, towards the end, when these, these uh participants are arguing and saying are we killing them? Is this doesn't sound right, cause the person in the other room is just screaming right? And then they'll tell him you have no choice but to continue. It is imperative that you do your function, that you do what you're supposed to do, what we brought you here to do, and they kind of just go at them.

Speaker 1: 8:25

So how many people you think went all the way to the highest shock? You know how many people put their conscience aside, heard a human being crying out, talking about a heart condition, put their morals aside, put their conscience aside and followed the instructor's guide. Well, when they got done, 65% of the participants right continued to the highest level of 450 volts. The person in the room was able to prod them and keep them thinking that this is something they had to do and 65% of them went all the way. Isn't that crazy? So what does that show us? How many of the subjects felt they were in a subordinate role. Well, as you read back through it, all of them did. They felt like the instructor was the person in the authority role and that they were. You know, just this participant who had to follow those instructions as correctional staff.

Speaker 1: 9:32

Have you ever been put in a situation where you felt like you had to go along? Have you ever felt like, because you're the subordinate, you have to do what's going on? Are there times when you went along because you felt like the actions were within your moral compass, even though they weren't within policy your moral compass, even though they weren't within policy? Maybe the person deserved it. Did you have a little bit of a punishment mentality? This guy's been blowing up all day. He deserves, you know, to have this team go in here. He deserves to be put in the restraint chair. Have you ever had those feelings? Have you ever ran into that?

Speaker 1: 10:11

I'm not going to lie. I can't answer these questions for everybody, but I can tell you I've been in that situation. I've made good decisions and I've made bad decisions Absolutely In my life. Um, I wasn't always right. But I'll also tell you I'm not going to be judged morally by anyone outside of corrections. If you're walking in corrections today and you're working in corrections, then I'll absolutely listen to what you have to say about some of the decisions I've made. But if you have never walked inside a prison with me, there's not much you can say that's going to convince me one way or the other. You've never dealt with what we deal with inside, right or wrong. I'm not saying that everything I did was right, but I'm also not saying I am saying I'm not going to be judged by people who don't understand where I've been and I'll leave it at that. So now that we've talked about the problem, let's talk about how we're going to make it better.

Speaker 1: 11:17

I think the first thing we need to talk about is expectations. As a warden, as a lieutenant, as a senior officer, as the senior pod officer, do your expectations matter? Does it matter that other people know your expectations? Are your expectations enough to get people to listen and to rise up and meet those expectations? I can tell you from 30 years of corrections and I'm talking whether it's inmates or whether it's staff, my expectations that I put forward. I always saw people try to rise to meet them, even inmates. If you come in a housing unit and you have no expectation for those inmates and you don't push the rules and they don't know what to expect out of you, they are going to do the least possible. If you walk into that housing unit carrying yourself with respect, having expectations for the behavior of the inmates in that housing unit, you're going to see them try to meet those expectations. Staff do the same thing. If you're in a position to where you're a lieutenant, how you interact with those staff on a daily basis is going to set the expectations on how they interact with everybody else. So I think expectations is one of the biggest parts of it.

Speaker 1: 12:51

If you've read Extreme Ownership how Navy Seals Lead and Win it's written by Jocko Wildnick and Leif Babin. It's a great book. If you haven't read it, you should read it. Extreme Ownership should become part of your life, part of your career. But there's a quote in there and it's just truth, and he says it's not what you preach, it's what you tolerate. What do you think about that If you cuss at inmates and you're a lieutenant or you're a warden or you're a senior officer in the pod. If you walk around cussing at inmates when you interact with them, you are now giving every person who looks up to you or you have authority over permission right to cuss at inmates. If you have a punishment mentality and you voice this and they see the way you treat these inmates, either verbally or physically, you've now given them permission to do the same thing, and I'll back up to that.

Speaker 1: 13:56

One news story. I think there's no way to deny where the eight staff have been removed for sexual misconduct. One of the first staff removed was the warden and when they did the interviews and stuff, you saw it in the newspaper. This isn't anything that's hidden. It was discussions in the newspaper. There were inmates and staff who said we thought this was going on. Well, if the warden's doing it, how do you expect that a lot of the other staff aren't doing it? He has set his expectations that this is okay. You can preach, you can put them through annual training every year and say, hey, we don't do sexual misconduct, but if they see you do it, it's okay For everybody in that institution. Think about that for a minute. Do you set the standard when you walk out, are your expectations there? Do you live by? You know what you tolerate, or do you live by what you preach? Because everybody else is going to follow that lead.

Speaker 1: 15:19

So the next thing I want to talk about is incidents or crisis, and we don't think about this a lot, but all incidents, all crisis, all use of force, all suicides, all fights, everything that we deal with inside there is an emotional crisis of some sort for somebody. Now that could be the inmate who's going through. He could be mad, he could be sad, he could be angry at an officer, he could be angry at another inmate. You know he could be having all these feelings. The staff responding are also in an emotional state. We're either a little scared Is another staff member getting hurt? We've got fear of the unknown. What are we running into? We may be mad that we got interrupted from our regular job, but, no matter what, we're responding in an emotional state. The inmates that we're dealing with are in an emotional state. The inmates that we're dealing with are in an emotional state.

Speaker 1: 16:16

So is it natural that things become emotional during these incidents, during these use of forces, during these riots, disturbances, whatever Of course it is. You know we are great at running to help our fellow officer, that body alarm goes off. Everybody's trucking, everybody's running. You're trying to get there. You've been at the bottom of that pile for 30 seconds but it feels like 10 minutes. You've been there. You're running to get there to help your buddy, but when it comes to helping them deal with their emotions in those situations, we stand back. It's hands off. Well, I can't get involved in that. Why not?

Speaker 1: 17:02

If you see someone getting emotional, it's your duty. The police officers call it duty to intervene. If you look at most large agency policies in law enforcement, they have a section of duty to intervene and that means it is your duty. If you see something going wrong, you need to step up. You need to stop this. You need to get that person out of there.

Speaker 1: 17:28

So why aren't we doing that for each other? We'll respond hard to help them, but when they become emotional and they're not doing what they're supposed to, why don't we step in between them? Why don't we grab that handle on the back of that that use of force vest and drag them out of the cell before they get in trouble? I've had to do it a bunch of times. I don't regret any of them.

Speaker 1: 17:55

No matter how you do it, it's normally going to go through the same pattern, right? You're going to grab a hold of them, drag them out of the cell, tell them to get back. Man, I'm okay, you ain't got no right doing that. They start calling names, they're cussing you, talking about your mother, whatever they can come up with, and then the next day almost every single time I had to do it the next day or within a week or a month, but afterwards they came back to me and they said you were right, thank you, because I probably saved their job. I've saved their career. I saved them from going to jail like some of these people who are being charged with murder and excessive use of force.

Speaker 1: 18:42

So that's what we need to do for each other Run as hard to that body, alarm and watch them when they become emotional and spend as much effort getting them out of those emotional areas if it's getting out of control, as you would if they were getting hit in a fight. I don't know, it just makes sense to me. We have this duty to intervene. I don't want them to get in trouble, and they may still get in a little trouble. You know, sometimes people throw the wrong punch, but if I grab a hold of that vest or I step in between them and I stop it from becoming multiple punches, their job's probably saved. So we need to be able to do that for each other. That's the next thing, I think. Um, and then finally, training. That's that's, that's the next thing we need.

Speaker 1: 19:41

You know, as a country, as a whole country, we're not giving our correctional staff the the training they deserve. And I recently went to work for a command presence A lot of you know that it's on my profile and the president of the company. We were talking about correctional training that we're building and putting out there and he said and I love it he said, let's give them the training they deserve. And that's the truth. Not the training they just have to have, not the annual training, not the minimum, but the training they deserve. The discrepancy between law enforcement and how they're trained and correctional staff and how we're trained is huge. I get to see it all the time. I go out weekly and I teach law enforcement and I teach correctional staff and I get to see the amount of money and the classes that law enforcement staff get to go attend, and then I'll meet correctional staff who went to the academy and they were taught defensive tactics, they were taught policy and they were taught firearms and they've been through annual training 12 times and they've never been trained outside their agency since then.

Speaker 1: 20:52

Why, why are we so scared to give correctional staff the training they need, the training they deserve, the training that will stop a lot of the problems we have. You know, I don't know. We've got to get out there. I want to see correctional staff getting more training in case law. That's skipped so much and there is so much case law out there, and maybe I'll do a um, uh, an episode on that, because I was never taught it in the academy, I had to learn it on my own. Um, I'd like to see correctional staff getting training on emotional intelligence. I'd like to see them getting training on social skills, which is a huge one. Right now.

Speaker 1: 21:44

I talk all the time to wardens and I say you know, what do you need? What kind of training do we need to get out there? And they all tell me the same thing the newer staff are coming in without built-in social skills. They just and I'm not blaming anybody, but there's a lot of phone time, there's a lot of computer time. There's a lot of this, and walking up to someone and saying, hey, how are you doing? Or, worse yet, walking up to an inmate and saying, come here, I want to pat you down, is not even a thought for a lot of them. So we've got to get them out there and get them comfortable with engaging with each other, with engaging with inmates. If we have staff that can't engage with inmates, we've got institutions that are out of control period. So we need to get the social skill training out there.

Speaker 1: 22:33

And, of course, the final one and I'll end with this but is leadership, leadership training. And I'm not talking and I'm going to say this in a way that some people won't appreciate, but I'm not talking about taking a failed lieutenant or captain who you don't have any other place to put, and then putting him in a training division to teach leadership skills to your up-and-coming staff. That's ridiculous. You need to be taking the best people out of the institutions at minimum, or better yet, go outside of your institution and hire people who specialize in teaching leadership and bring those people. You can bring them to your institution, you can send your people there, whatever, but get your staff leadership training, and that's everyone from the brand new CO who needs leadership training. When you walk in a prison, when you walk in a facility, you're a leader, like it or not. You're leading inmates, you're leading work crews, you're leading a housing unit. They need leadership training, basic leadership training. And then you need to be investing in your sergeants and lieutenants and captains and teaching them how to supervise.

Speaker 1: 23:48

I came up with it knocking my head against the walls, because nobody taught me on the way up. Nobody showed me the steps, nobody talked to me about strategic and tactical leadership. I had to learn this stuff on my own. Why are you not teaching it to your staff? And then, finally, we've got administrations who are so worried politically about where their next job's coming that they don't have time to pay attention to the people that they're supposed to be serving. Oh, I did. I said serving because that's what wardens and administrators are supposed to be doing. If you get promoted because you're making everybody else look good, that's wonderful. If you're getting promoted because you're making everybody else look bad, that's wonderful. If you're getting promoted because you're making everybody else look bad, you should be removed. Okay, I said all crisis were emotional, didn't I? Well, sometimes my podcast is emotional too, but we have got to get everything from the newest officer to the top brass into leadership training.

Speaker 1: 24:51

Leadership is a universal correctional skill. It's not for a few, it's for everyone. So I hope you learned a little bit about that. I just wanted to cover some of that, and I'm going to go back to one thing, and I want you to, whoever you are, wherever you are, I want you to put as much thought and care into watching the backs of your staff who become emotional in our institutions as you would run to a body alarm. It's just as important, right? Okay, thank you. Before we go, I'd like to take a minute to thank one of our sponsors.

Speaker 1: 25:37

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Speaker 1: 26:05

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