78: A Journey of Growth and Change in Prison Management - Interview w/Art Beeler

His four decades in the Bureau of Prisons have equipped him with a library of stories, and in our latest episode, Art's candid reflections peel back the curtain on the daily grind of corrections work, from the first clang of the prison doors to the intricate challenges of managing inmate programs. His tales are not just a narrative of personal growth within the Bureau but a masterclass on the evolution of federal prison systems and the strategic navigation of career progression within such a demanding field.

The landscape of correctional work is fraught with complexities, and Art doesn't shy away from discussing the nuances of his profession. He delves into the transformation of work programs,  and the unique considerations when overseeing diverse inmate populations. Post-retirement hasn't slowed Art down; he continues to impact the field through his consultancy and auditing roles, emphasizing the significance of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) and the importance of maintaining a humane approach within the industry's strict regulations.

You can reach Art here: afbjab@aol.com

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:09

Hello and welcome back to the Prison Officer Podcast. Before we get to our guest today, I just want to take a minute to thank one of our sponsors. During my 29 years in corrections, I've used or supervised Pepperball hundreds of times. Now. As a master instructor for Pepperball, I get to go out across the country and teach others about the versatility and effectiveness of the Pepperball system. Pepperball is always the first option in my correctional toolbox because it's got the ability to transition quickly from area saturation to direct impact. You know, using non-lethal organic projectiles and with impact ranges from 0 to 150 feet, pepperball's perfect for cell extractions or fights out on the rec yard. To learn more about Pepperball, go to wwwpepperballcom or click the link below in today's show notes. Pepperball is the safer option first, and if you haven't done so, please take a moment to like my podcast or, better yet, hit that subscribe button so that you'll be notified when the next episode comes out. Well, hello and welcome back to the Prison Officer Podcast. My name is Mike Cantrell.

Speaker 1: 1:14

Today's guest is Art Beeler, longtime administrator in the Bureau of Prisons. The list of things that this man has done is lengthy and we're going to touch on a lot of them, but he knows a lot about corrections. He's been involved with it for, I believe, over 40 years. I'll let him double check me. Um, but um, I'd like to welcome Art Beeler to the podcast. Welcome, art. Thanks, mike. I'm glad to be here, absolutely, um, glad we got this chance to talk. I don't know that we ever actually worked together, but I've seen a lot of your stuff on LinkedIn and so I'm always looking at your leadership posts and stuff like that that you post, so I'm happy to have you on the podcast. If you've listened to the podcast, I usually start off the same way. I like to hear about where you came from and where you grew up and kind of walk me through the first part of your life there before you became a correctional officer.

Speaker 2: 2:13

Thanks, mike. I'm a Marine brat. My father was in the Marine Corps. He was a lifer. We moved from place to place all over the East Coast, primarily as I was growing up, and he retired in 1969 because he was afraid he was going back to Vietnam for another time and he said, no, he was probably going to go for 30, but he didn't. He got out and I'm glad he did so. He was in Korea too. Yeah, he was in'm glad he did so. He was in Korea too. Yeah, he was in World War II Korea and Vietnam.

Speaker 1: 2:49

Oh my gosh, Wow, that man saw some stuff. Yeah, he did.

Speaker 2: 2:57

I wanted to go to law school. If you remember the early 90s, it was, excuse me, 1970. It was not a time that things were growing. In fact, vietnam was winding down. I went into the reserves with the intention to go into Marine Corps law. Of course, the good Marine Corps dropped the program before I could get there. Corps dropped the program before I could get there. I stayed in the reserves for my second year, but all of a sudden I didn't have to.

Speaker 2: 3:40

But I had a good friend who was a probation officer in eastern North Carolina. He said why don't you go in other directions? He said you'll be working with the law. This won't be a lawyer, and his words were very true. I went to East Carolina University in Greenville, north Carolina, which had a degree in correctional administration and social work, went there and graduated from there. But before I graduated, one of the professors, a gentleman by the name of Gus Bowler, who only your oldest folks would know, came to me. He was a professor there and he was a former deputy director of the Bureau of Prisons. And he said how would you like a quote-unquote aid internship to go to the Federal Reformatory in Petersburg? And I heard one word aid.

Speaker 2: 4:42

I was working my way through school, so I went to Petersburg as an intern. At the end of my internship they offered me a criminal officer's job and, as they said, the rest is history.

Speaker 1: 4:58

Wow, yeah, I like the way you said it was part of the law. I think people don't think about that often. Our criminal justice system is made up of three parts, and corrections is not part of the law enforcement part. You've got the courts, you've got law enforcement enforcement and then you've got corrections. Who handles the punishment part of it? So I think that's interesting that he brought that to you in that manner. So you go to petersburg. Had you ever been in a prison before? Just a visit, yeah, yeah. So what was that like? Walking in the first day, door slams. Now you are working. Even though it's an intern, you're still in there like everybody else. What'd that feel?

Speaker 2: 5:46

like Well, I can give you that I can't tell you how many times the door has slammed since then, but I can tell you that that door slammed and it was a slam because there was a grate from the door out of the administration building into the compound and the door slammed.

Speaker 1: 6:08

Sure, sure, they'll remember that, I bet I think we all do. I think it's when it becomes real, isn't it yeah?

Speaker 2: 6:17

The other thing I remember as well is my first day in uniform. It was my first day in uniform after having finished my internship and became a correctional officer. My first day in uniform they had a serious assault in one of the housing units. Yeah, and the lieutenant says Beeler, you go, ramirez, you go pick up those folks. So here we go, tromping over to the unit and we were locking up 23 people that day.

Speaker 1: 6:48

Wow, wow, yeah, um, so did you see blood that day? Was that the first time you saw the? Uh, you know the blood, the fight, the stabbing or whatever went on. How did that affect you?

Speaker 2: 6:58

I I saw when I was an intern. Um, it bothered me but I didn't have no issue with it because I said my job was to make sure I could try to keep them alive.

Speaker 1: 7:14

Sure, sure, yeah, absolutely part of our job. So now you're a correctional officer. Walk me through that.

Speaker 2: 7:23

Correctional officer. Walk me through that. Well, I became a correctional officer and as all correctional officers, I had all sorts of assignments. I remember my first day into a tower Of course all the towers are closed now but my first day as a tower and I said my God, have I got to be up here for eight hours? I try I mean a different way of the books trying to keep stay awake at mid watch in the tower. Oh yeah, having some excitement during one of my tower tours is that we had six inmates escape through a fence with a vehicle. I'll never forget that either and I never will forget that that was on Christmas Eve and I was supposed to go home and see my parents for the first time. My wife was there and she was there by herself and I called her and I said I can't come home, honey. And she said when are you going to get home? And I said I have no idea.

Speaker 1: 8:27

Right, absolutely. So when did you start thinking about moving up in leadership, was that?

Speaker 2: 8:38

That was pretty fast. I was hoping to come on board as a case manager. I was hoping to come on board as a case manager and when I came on board as a correctional officer, I will tell you that my wife said why are you doing this? And I said because I need the job. I was still going to try to go to law school at some point in time but I never did. And I will tell you, the two years I spent as a directional officer were probably the most important two years of my career.

Speaker 2: 9:15

I got to see what offenders did at 3 o'clock in the morning, when there were no suits in the building there. An old living unit, which was an open bay living unit by myself, sure you know had apples and oranges thrown at me Probably the most important only there for about a year. And I was on morning watch patrol and here comes this guy lumbering in civilian clothes inside the compound All of a sudden. I said sir, may I ask you who you are? And he was the new warden. And he says Mr Mueller, why don't you show me the next four hours? So for four hours we walked the compound. I asked him questions, he asked me questions.

Speaker 2: 10:19

I still remember something I used 15 years later in our discussion is we had just had a bunch of folks or had a person climb the water tower and at that time the water tower was in a compound, wasn't fenced, and I said a bunch of people wanted you to go up and get them and you said, no, just leave them up there. When it gets cold or or hungry, he'll come down. And guess what he did. Well, about 15, 15 years later I was at el reno, oklahoma, and we had a bunch of cubans on the rec yard and they refused to come in. I think there were 15 of them and they come in and I had an associate ward were 15 of them and they refused to come in.

Speaker 2: 11:06

And I headed up the board and says do you want me to dress up the team and go ahead and get them bossed? And I said nope, I want you just to put a jug of water there and leave them alone. Well, at 3 o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 1: 11:19

Guess what?

Speaker 2: 11:23

I told them don't give them any coats, leave them just like they are. And at three o'clock in the morning they called and they said yeah, they're coming in.

Speaker 1: 11:37

That was a lesson of experience right there, absolutely and I think that comes from experience is patience. We forget patience a lot. You know, we we get so caught up in the now of stuff that we sometimes just back off and and let things have a breath. And that could be a cell extraction, it could be all kinds of stuff, but let things have a breath sometimes is something I think it's. It's a tool and a lesson for everybody moving up into leadership positions, absolutely, and it comes with maturity.

Speaker 2: 12:08

Yeah, I mean, I used to have staff that said what are you doing? If you know me, you know that I've run mental health hospitals, two large mental health hospitals. I had an inmate who said I'm not eating on a hunger strike.

Speaker 2: 12:27

I said okay, let's go Right. Second thing I walked down there and I can't remember the guy's name. I said what's going to stop you from being on a hunger strike? And he says I want some ice cream. I said okay, I went down, got him a pint of ice cream. Came back says I want some ice cream. I said okay, I went down, got him a pint of ice cream. Came back. Says now, if I give this to you, you have already told me you're going to stop the hunger strike. Yes, gave him the ice cream. He stopped the hunger strike.

Speaker 2: 12:58

You know a lot of staff used to get up doing stuff like that and I said my number one job is keeping people in here and keeping you safe. If I can do something that doesn't cost me money to keep you safe, I'm going to do it, and you can think what you want from me, but my job is I want to go home and stay home.

Speaker 1: 13:19

Absolutely. Yeah, I worked at Springfield, so I saw a lot of the same thing and you did have administrators. And when I was 25 years old, I wanted at Springfield, so I saw a lot of the same thing and you did have administrators. And when I was 25 years old, I wanted to run in there, but you did have administrators. That saw the bigger vision there, which is I'm going to have to suit up a team twice a day. This is costing money, institutions shut down during that time. All of these factors when you just solve this problem with a 50 cent thing uh, ice cream from the commissary you got it yeah, yeah, absolutely so.

Speaker 1: 13:52

Where'd you go next? What was your next step up? Well I stayed in pittsburgh for four years.

Speaker 2: 13:59

Um, my last year almost the acting just almost the entire time while holding my wallet, by the way but I then went in for I don't know how many jobs. The job I got was being a witness protections case manager in DC Wow, and for a couple of years a little over a year for a couple of years a little over a year I dealt with all kinds of people who were being hit out all over the place because of their testimony, and I had to learn how to work with US attorneys, us attorneys' offices, and all of them were not the same. Let me just tell you that way it really boiled down to the personality of those, and we were all working through the Office of Enforcement Operations over at Justice, but all they wanted to do was say it was happy.

Speaker 1: 15:00

Right right, that sounds like a pretty cool job, so where did you go from there?

Speaker 2: 15:09

I became two more jobs in DC. I became the assistant administrator for correctional programs. The largest stuff there was DC designation Right District of Columbia Superior Court designation. Largest stuff there was when dc designation right district of columbia superior court and I was a guy by the name of james williams you may remember his name. Uh, I became his executive assistant okay, excellent, yeah.

Speaker 1: 15:41

So what made you want to leave DC and go become a warden? The?

Speaker 2: 15:47

next step. The reality of it is, if you stayed in DC too long, you never got out right. There were lots of people in DC and I did not. Yeah. So I went to Bill Ingram, who's been the assistant director for correctional programs, and I did not want to. Yeah. So I went to Bill Ingram, who's been the assistant director for correctional programs, and I said, bill, I need to go back out to the field.

Speaker 2: 16:14

There was a fly in the wind in that my wife had just called and she had serious medical post delivery. So I told gil, I just got someplace, um eight hours from here so I can bring my wife back to the doctor when she had her doctor's appointment. And gil was just one of the gentlemen. He always he says, well, I can send you back to Petersburg as an executive. And I said sounds good to me. So I went back to Petersburg as the executive assistant and slash at the time case management coordinator. We went one of those times that we're trying to do three jobs in one yeah, and in charge of the camp Yep Got camp, yep Got it Okay.

Speaker 1: 17:09

So what was next? Warden? Where did you go?

Speaker 2: 17:13

next, I went to where did I go next? I went to the LOOF, Minnesota, as assistant superintendent. We had just opened the LOOF on an Air Force base. It had just opened Loof on an Air Force base. It closed. We didn't open the entire base. The guard kept part of the base and we got the other part of the base. It was an interesting time. It's all cold, very cold. We tried contracting for the first time a couple places in there. One didn't work, Of course, being the assistant superintendent which later became a warden, and all those places.

Speaker 2: 17:57

When you became the associate warden, I had everyone under my supervision, except for fellow presidents, and so I had 13 or 14 disciplines that I was responsible. Uh, you learned all the paper I missed the name.

Speaker 1: 18:16

What was the name of the?

Speaker 2: 18:19

fort duluth, duluth. Okay, you're up in duluth it.

Speaker 1: 18:21

It was Duluth Air Force Base. Oh, okay, okay, we, you know I've said on this and you can tell me your opinion, but I've said on the podcast quite a bit. You know, there was a time when we had a lot of these camps scattered around near military bases where we took care of veterans' homes, where they went out and did the work and stuff. But the last few years, or most of the last of my career campers are sitting in their house watching TV and we don't have them out working like we're doing. We're not saving the federal government money the way we used to. So that's just one of the things I've been talking about. I would like to see either put a fence around it. Either they need a fence or they don't. If they need a fence, put them behind one. If they don't put technology on them, I'm conflicted as to why we keep some of the camps open. What's your? Since you went through part of that, do you have an opinion on that? Since you went through part of that, do you have an opinion on that?

Speaker 2: 19:25

Well, camps on military bases and I have been at two of those and I helped one of them. They have a benefit on a military basis because they're all working. And when I was at Maxwell, which was my first warden's position, we sent we had a population of 900 and 500 or 500 of them out to work either for the basic or for the air base I can't air university. Or there was another base about five miles away called gunner air force base. We had a living there. So those folks worked. They worked, yeah, pretty hard um you know when I was not as many.

Speaker 1: 20:21

There's not as many jobs out there for the, the inmates. You know leavenworth, the our camp inmates used to take care of the fort there, um. But now you walk in there and there there's maybe a hundred out a day, um, so what are we doing with the rest of them? You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 2: 20:37

good question, but yeah, and you know there's uh a lot of the reason we have camps is all political.

Speaker 1: 20:47

Yeah, I mean the bottom line is.

Speaker 2: 20:48

There's a lot of folks in camps that probably could be home on electronic monitoring, yeah, but people don't see that as prison.

Speaker 1: 20:59

Yeah, yeah, there's a public perception too, absolutely. So where did you go next? What was the next step after you were taking care of those?

Speaker 2: 21:08

I went to Lexington, Kentucky, as it's important.

Speaker 1: 21:12

Now Lexington's one of the old institutions. Yeah, what was that like?

Speaker 2: 21:17

It was built in the 20s as a public health service hospital. Public health service gave up in 1974, and all of a sudden we got a prison. It was a very unique place in that during my associate warden's time there we had male and female compound at the same time. And let's just put it this way, I learned a whole lot about how strong a sexual urge is when I was at Lexington.

Speaker 1: 21:50

I knew a food service administrator that worked there then and he said it was just constant keeping your eyes on them.

Speaker 2: 21:57

Oh yeah, you know we were at that time a very strong mission but we were not a medical. I went there as a social warden but it was old institution that always required and it was a big, big grounds institution. We had to keep going. So we did not have a camp, so we kept outside going. So we did not have a camp, so we kept outside running through gate passes. We would have about 100 inmates go out to back gate every day to cut grass and every time no shovel, snow or ice or whatever was there and it was a. I was both AWO and AWP while I was there, so it was an interesting time.

Speaker 1: 22:49

Yeah, yeah. Um, so what was your first warden? Where'd you go to for that, my?

Speaker 2: 22:56

first wardenship was at Maxwell, Montgomery, Alabama.

Speaker 1: 22:59

Oh, okay, the camp and then and then, where'd you go from there? Now you're in LA. Okay, you have many places. Have you been to? Because it's a bunch?

Speaker 2: 23:11

yeah, yeah, I got out of the fire, I got the sweetest job I ever had. I always tell people they ask me well, what was it like at maxwell? But well, we rebuilt the whole with inmate labor, which we did that year. I was there. But the hardest decision I make is whether to serve french for pancakes on friday morning whichever one kept them working, huh yeah, it's that simple, but that's what I used to go.

Speaker 2: 23:44

But I left Macon and went to Chicago and that was like going into the frying pan Running a jail area. I got most of my information not from pre-sentence investigation or from the probation office. I got it from reading the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times Because it would tell me about the inmates. If they were serious inmates, meaning with any sort of history, it would go from the papers. You know, it's where I got my real appreciation of gangs.

Speaker 2: 24:26

We had the El Rufinus there who were fighting for Chicago. Well, by the name of Jim Port, and it wasn't a nice. I don't know where he is. I hope he's met his match. But the kicker is that we had gangs there. We had a US attorney who would like to keep their inmates there forever. Our job was to get them there forever. I always thought we worked for the same attorney general until I got to Chicago. Attorney general until I got to Chicago. And all of a sudden I found out that our role and our mission was not the same role and mission of the marshal for the US attorney's office and the job was to work with everybody.

Speaker 1: 25:17

So you mentioned earlier that you've taken care of two federal medical centers, and I worked at a medical center and I know how big a job that is, but I have no idea how big a job that is as a warden.

Speaker 2: 25:29

um, talk to me a little bit about those two medical centers well, when I found out that, uh, chicago and I went back to lex and the central office. I went back to lexington again as the ward by by that time Federal Medical Center and the women were leaving. It had gone to all females, the women were leaving and going to Caswell and so I had to do a mission at Lexington. That was geriatrics, and you know I have a great amount of admiration for the executive staff during that time because they realized we needed a place for geriatric inmates. Quite frankly, we probably need more than one. Now I don't know, I'm not there anymore, but we opened up as a geriatric facility for male inmates.

Speaker 2: 26:29

People would say, well, that's easy, they're not going to cause problems. And they did cause problems in the way they had some fights and some abortion stuff, but they really didn't get in trouble. Where they got in trouble is you had to try to talk them into medical stuff. You couldn't get them. Sometimes they didn't do what they wanted to do. They're all over the place.

Speaker 1: 26:53

Right. Yeah, a lot of people don't understand how hard it is. I mean, it's one thing to deal with an inmate who may have a propensity for violence, but then when they get older now they've got dementia or they've got Alzheimer's, and those are some of the most difficult inmates I ever dealt with.

Speaker 2: 27:10

Um yeah, I can still name the one I won't, but I can about 10 of them that I know on top of my head that you know why were we keeping them? Um, and I asked that question a couple of times and got told got told one time to sit up and be quiet.

Speaker 1: 27:32

Well, and there's there's many sides to that too, because we, you know, we have social workers in the Bureau of Prisons, as you know, and placement of some of those guys, you know, it's the the greater, I don't know the the the greater community, the public almost, would rather keep them there than to send this person where you know, a nursing home, where you've got a your grandmother and grandfather. So I don't know, we, we have a lot of places there where we can, we can accept those challenges and make some changes. And geriatrics has grown since then, um, the, the prison population is getting old and they're living longer and we're taking better care of them.

Speaker 2: 28:14

So we've got guys, you know, with long sentences, up into their 780s, 90s one thing that I don't think and this isn't talking about system, I'm talking about the industry as itself. I don't think we've done a good job of planning for what's coming around the corner and going to hit us, and that's all these folks that are chronologically 15 years older than their biological. All of a sudden, you've got somebody who's 60 years old and has had a stroke. Nobody knows what to do with it. So you do the best you can with them. You develop programs, you have inmate companions. You roll them around the institution, which has good points and bad points. You have people take them to dinner. You have inmates we call the companion program at Lexington. When I was at Buckner, we had one at Lexington, but it wasn't as active, and we had a companion program that stayed with them while they were dying Right.

Speaker 1: 29:31

Because oftentimes they're the ones that end them up. Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned Butner there. That's a huge institution, especially now when you took over Butner. What was it like then?

Speaker 2: 29:46

and what did you see while you were there? I started as Butner and was destined to open a medical center that has been grown from the ground up. Springfield was open in 1933. We were building the institution and do it as frugally as we could, and so we didn't get everything to start with. But there were three things we did from day one. One is we had a large mental health contingent. We got a lot of those inmates, fci construction institution one. Then we got oncology service and we had to take care of all the oncology services in the Bureau of Prisons when they were identified. And then we had a very small work rate. So we had lots of different variations there, you know you had to get.

Speaker 2: 30:57

Number one is that you had to make sure that staff who were working mental health you'll appreciate that having worked there at Springfield we had to teach them how to deal with mental health. We had to teach them how to attempt to de-escalate situations. We had to teach them that going in and out probably was not the way to deal with those people. Most of the time there's a ton of things, but most of the time there's a time and place for everything, but most of the time you didn't go in on my game. You tried to make sure that you had some what I call old heads back in oil that knew how to talk to folks and even schizophrenics and schizoaffective disorders. They had a rapport and most of the time 99% of the time they would have the situation handled. And you know, along with good psychologists and psychiatrists, we were able in most situations to deal with those folks.

Speaker 2: 32:07

Now, that's not an always Sure. I remember a debate that was that way for seven years Tried everything we could to try. Yeah, still didn't work. Still was schizophrenic, I left it. I was tired, still didn't work, still was schizophrenic, I left Tired. And you know, most of the time we could find the right not we doctors could find the right combination of medicines and get the person to be a little better. You know, butner was a place where we also took off high-security health healthcare cases along with you, and you know I've had a lot of terrorists, a lot of bombers and all those kind of there and you know be able to run a high security institution inside of a house and that was the challenge.

Speaker 1: 33:09

Yeah, absolutely. I know sometimes they'd send one to Springfield or Butner and it just did wear the staff down after a while with some of those high profile of those terrorists. So we'd switch them out just to have a break after a couple of years of two, three times a day dealing with that same inmate.

Speaker 2: 33:29

that's uncontrollable and whatever Same thing we try to work with them for a while, we try to rotate them out, just to give staff a break.

Speaker 2: 33:41

Yeah, I mean I had a good relationship with the union on this part of my tenure was that, I think people who came to me and said, warden, I can't work here anymore, it's too depressing, it's all those kind of things. And you know, luckily we had four institutions at Butler I call it five institutions so I would be able to typically find that person who got left on the compound or right as they're in the institution and let them stay. But people don't realize that the toll. Everybody talks about prison and I've worked in prisons, of course but everybody talks about the toll of prisons on staff and one of the tolls is the way they have to manage with people who are very sick or very mentally ill.

Speaker 1: 34:38

Sure, I think one of the unrecognized heroes of medical centers especially are the nurses, because in order to be a nurse you have to have a certain amount of empathy. And then you walk into prison and now I have to. I have to take that empathy but I have to put it with, you know, concern and security and everything else that goes with it. And some of the nurses I felt the sorriest for were the dialysis nurses, because you're going to see that same inmate three times a week. There's no way to get a break you know, yeah.

Speaker 2: 35:17

So I will tell you what some people call a funny story. But when we got brand new, a lot of new nurses and we want to go got a new nurse, they would go through inmate familiarization. And I always tried to. Not inmate familiarization, excuse me. If Right, Institutional, yeah, institutional familiarization. One of my second thoughts was I would teach. Look at the nurses. And I said I want to teach you how to have contact with your inmates. And most of the other people looked at me like I was crazy. Again, I got called out but I would go, I would show, grab his elbow with your hand and nobody's going to see that as a sexual endowment of any kind. But if you have to show that you, you tell the inmate, you grab his elbow to tell him that you care for him, but don't do anything else, Right?

Speaker 1: 36:23

And it worked Sure, sure, absolutely. So you retired. Tell me about when did you retire? 2009? Is that right?

Speaker 2: 36:37

2009. So Basically got kicked out. I would have been able to stay for about six more months, but my tax number wasn't so high the first of the year, so I got out. That was an adjustment. After being a warden at however many places I was. I was a warden at seven places and became complex warden and so I added some more institutions. The complex warden also said also you go out and you're joe, nobody again, right?

Speaker 1: 37:12

um, so you retired apparently back to north carolina, but you, you didn't, uh, slow down any, did you not a whole lot. Um, tell me a little bit about what you've been doing well, for what?

Speaker 2: 37:25

the afghanistan, afghanistan every year? Not because I got called. I asked if I would go to Afghanistan and I did. And from everything I did with my dad after Vietnam, things haven't changed a lot. The State Department won't, the Defense Department won't, and guess what? I was stuck in the middle because I was a State Department consultant assigned to a JTF, which is a joint task force. I was the military.

Speaker 1: 38:04

What did they have you consulting about mostly?

Speaker 2: 38:07

Well, I was supposed to be the rule of law. Okay, what I ended up? Report writer for the three-year Admiral.

Speaker 1: 38:18

Yeah, the way that works sometimes, isn't it?

Speaker 2: 38:20

Yeah, and so you know. They asked me if I would ever come back. I said not, unless.

Speaker 1: 38:25

I love yeah.

Speaker 2: 38:25

Yeah, so uh, you've been, if I would ever come back.

Speaker 1: 38:27

I said not unless I love them. Yeah, yeah. So you've been doing a lot of auditing. I see that.

Speaker 2: 38:33

I audit for the American Directional Association. I've audited a couple of things too, but primarily I've audited for H&E. I've done that. I did that even before I was in prisons but then legal said it was a conflict of interest so we stopped it and we went back and I've been doing it since then. I don't do a lot. I do five or six a year. There are people who audit all the time. I enjoy auditing. Number one it keeps me in the business. Number two is I find new things that make sense and I can swipe into somebody else. And number three it's nice to go think this is crazy. It's nice to see an end mate everyone.

Speaker 1: 39:30

I actually understand all that more than you think. Uh, I went to work for pepper bottle after I retired, so I still get to go into prisons and and jails and I get to talk to the staff and I get to, you know, walk through the housing units and I get to smell food service, you know, yeah, jeff, and it's weird but it's almost comforting after doing it for so long. So, with you being a pre coordinator, just a couple of minutes here, but, um, that's so important and I tried to cover it a little bit on one episode. But if you're talking to an employee who's got a few years in, what's some of the big takeaways that you're seeing, or that you come across things that you're running across that need to be fixed, that type of stuff what would you say to them?

Speaker 2: 40:13

Well, most of the time line staff just say, okay, this is another requirement, we've got to do the work here Now. I'm a big believer and I'm going to go through the whole thing one second, because it puts sexual violence and says we're not going to have it.

Speaker 2: 40:34

I'm all for that. I even taught Priya for a year to new pre-auditors, but for about five years now I guess I haven't been doing pretty well. Okay, it's not that I don't believe in the process, it's that I can no longer work for them when they aren't being flexible. In regards to what I call the trauma of women going to have to work inside of institutions, when you had to announce yourself and you say women on the unit, and especially in high-security institutions, every doggone person who had nothing to lose was sitting there masturbating in front of the staff members, right. And I went to the PREA folks and I said you know, we've got to figure out how to do it. And they said well, you can write up an incident report.

Speaker 2: 41:37

And I said you think that for somebody who has been serving 25 years in prison, an incident report is going to do anything? So you put them in a safe for 30 days. It's not going to do a thing in the world, especially if they were, if they were mentally ill a number of them were. But we got to figure out how to do differently and they said, no. I said, well, I've got three artists and it's a reasonable decision. Is that I work. I work too hard and too long. It females to work inside of this. I remember the work of prisons working inside the wall and they have normalized a lot and they've made prison safer. So you're not going to figure out how to protect the women and I'm not going to do all this anymore.

Speaker 1: 42:32

Yeah, yeah, I worked early. I worked in 1992. I came into Missouri State, penn, which was a very old prison, still a lot of bad things going on there. I saw prison rape. I saw the effects of prison rape on inmates there. So, absolutely, priya was needed, um, it was something that needed to be brought to attention and so that we could deal with it. But I'm I'm kind of like you.

Speaker 1: 43:00

The last few years, um, the, the, it's the unintended consequences of it, we've just overdone it to where it's it's not useful anymore. I've got staff I had, I had staff when I was opening up a new institution that were just absolutely petrified to put hands on an inmate. Right, we can't run institutions without putting hands on inmate. You know, um, and I had a warden, tell me, and he, he was uh, uh, did a great job because I told him I was having this problem. He says here's what you do. You're the captain, you go down there to, uh, you know, and you pick out the biggest inmates sitting in, you know, and you pull him up front and you say this is what a pat search looks like, here, in front of everybody. And then there's no question from that point on how we do pat searches and that stopped a lot of it because the inmates weren't able to Buffalo the staff with hey, you're not supposed to do that. No, this is what the captain does.

Speaker 2: 43:55

Yeah, but you know there's a lot of unintended consequences that came with that and there's a lot of people who are very strict A pre a case on it, okay, um who were very scared to put a Priya case on it. I was consulting North Carolina. They were getting ready for an ABA audit and they had a gang shower. It's an old facility and they had a gang shower and the inmates had the tendency let's put it that way to take a sheet or a blanket and hang it up over there so you can sit in. And I was in a male institution and I walked in and I'm going to follow pre on you. You can't come in here without taking a shower. And I said you do what you have to do. My job is to make sure you're okay. And so, yeah, I went in. I've had a couple of cases called on me, sure, so that's just part of the job. Yeah, but we have staff and in North Carolina this guy was.

Speaker 2: 44:57

I remember this associate warden saying you can't go down there. I said why not? I said myself we don't want you going down there. I said why not? I said to myself we don't want you going down there. And I had a warden who said I was consulting at one of the hospitals and the warden said we would prefer you not going down there by yourself. And I said okay. I said I'm a consultant, I will do what you ask me to do, but it's not right.

Speaker 1: 45:28

Right, yeah, a lot of it is just knowledge. Knowledge is power. The more you know and understand the process, the more you can walk within that process without worry and fear. You know, once I became knowledgeable about Priya, I'm like you it didn't bother me to go anywhere. It didn't bother me for an inmate to come up and say, well, you're not supposed to do that. Well, yes, I am. This is what policy says, this is what priya says, this all falls within it. So that's that's what I would say to everybody get knowledgeable. If you're, if you're having concerns, if you've got fear about working with inside of priya, um, get knowledgeable about it, and that solves a lot of that.

Speaker 2: 46:07

I agree wholeheartedly, it's tough.

Speaker 1: 46:12

It is, it is. It's a tough situation, it's needed, but at the same time it's being kind of messed with.

Speaker 2: 46:23

So what I told the Priya folks? You see, I said you five fought and well told them that you've got a pragmatic, you want to do the job, but you cannot make the job so undesirable for that I want to do it?

Speaker 1: 46:40

sure, absolutely, let's uh. So we talked the other day for just a minute and, uh, we were talking about, you know, a couple of things that we can talk about on here, and one of the things you mentioned was the problem with staffing right now. Uh, you said that was one of the things that you're seeing and, of course, I mean we're talking about it all over the place, but tell me what you're seeing in the positions you're in with understaffing and how that's affecting corrections.

Speaker 2: 47:09

Well, you know, there's a whole mindset Now. When I started, which was almost 50 years ago, but corrections was seen as a desirable job. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 47:21

Uh for a lot of people, it was how they got their benefit and they would work another job, secondary. Well, most of that's gone away and so people are working in prison. That would, I mean, it's just not the same People. We have more females working in prison now than we probably ever had, sure, I think. But all that has happened. That's not the reason we have understaffing. We have understaffing because we have not told staff and publicly in my view how important they are.

Speaker 2: 48:06

I don't mean awardingen getting up and saying you're very important. I mean the government getting up and saying we have to have corrective officers. They do a good job. They're just like police. What I equate this to? We're just like police officers. We're just inside the fence. The only difference is we get to know the people a lot better, because we've got 10 or 15 or 20 years and I have very good friends with police officers and they would tell me I could not have your job because I arrest them, I arraign them, you guys take them, put them in jail and the only other time I ever see them is on court dates, unless they're released.

Speaker 2: 48:54

And I said, yeah, that's not the way you have to work in science. You have to develop your behavior. Science is skilled to be able to learn how to talk with people and not to people. You have to learn how to talk with people and not to people. You have to learn how to manage them as people and respect them as people.

Speaker 2: 49:14

And a whole different mindset and most people think we're either overblown social workers or knuckle-draggers. And we're neither. We're probably in the middle, and that's why you tell people if I have to have use for it, I'll use for it. It's not something that I'm embarrassed doing, because what happens more times than not is my staff get hurt, but I have to use for it. I have to talk to that roommate that night in a compassionate way because his father did not. We do that too. We have to go on both ends of the spectrum and we have to be able to go on both ends of the spectrum. So that's a difficult thing to do and I tell you a good correctional officer office do that day in and day, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think you're right about.

Speaker 1: 50:16

It's got to change that. You know, corrections is talking about short staffing. The country has to talk about short staffing. This isn't a corrections problem just like we talked about earlier. There there's three tiers, you know, to our justice system the courts, the law enforcement and corrections. If one of those fails, the justice system fails. So it's not about keeping or letting corrections fail. If that happens, the whole justice systems fail. That's correct fail. If that happens, the whole justice systems fail. And so what? What are some of the stuff I mean? You've been around a long time, um, and you talked about. It's not just about, you know, telling them good job. A lot of, excuse me. You see a lot of memes on the uh, the computer. You know, another pizza party, another pizza party. It's not about pizza parties anymore. We've got to tell these officers and show the world what's going on and how good a job they do and how important they are. How do we do that?

Speaker 2: 51:18

Well, we haven't done very well I include myself is we got to go out and press the button? We have to go talk to them. We have to get on their agenda. We have to tell them these people are important, they're doing an important job and society would hurt tremendously if they weren't out there doing their job. I try to do that every time I get a chance to do that, but I think every warden, every associate warden, needs to be out in their communities pressing the flesh and in their surrounding communities pressing the flesh. You know we still have a lot of institutions that the biggest employer in the county is that prison that's sitting there, but they don't want to hear from us unless there's a problem. I think we have to go before the problem and tell them that this is what's happening and this is what's going on.

Speaker 1: 52:26

Yeah, prison and corrections culture has such a long history of keeping everything inside the fence and being quiet about it, and there's two parts to that. One is corrections didn't want people digging into their dirty business or what went on. And the other one is, I think every time people see corrections out in public, we remind them that the boogeyman's out there, you know, and he lives behind that fence, so they just as well forget about it. Also. Now I have seen in this podcast as an example, you know, there's four or five of us podcasts going now about corrections which you wouldn't have seen 10 years ago. There was maybe a book once in a while.

Speaker 1: 53:06

So if we can talk about this, if we can get it out there, if administrators will start sharing, not only when something bad happens with staff, which is the only time we hit the news, but make it a I don't know, uh, make it a bigger thing when, when the good is done, when an officer, I mean, in mean, in my, in my career, I've probably saved two or three lives during suicides, attempted suicides, you know, but that was just. Oh, okay, clean off the blood, you know, go back to your housing unit and come back to work the next day. Uh, we've got to. I don't know. Make that a bigger part of who we are.

Speaker 2: 53:45

We have got to make sure that the public, how valuable they are, they don't really get it. That's prison. As long as they're inside and nobody's getting hurt, that's the only thing they care about. We've got to go out and tell people why prisons do that and how prisons do that and why they don't, comparatively, and why they don't have many riots, comparatively. We got to go out and tell these people. Usually it's hard to get on somebody's, but you got to keep on trying because the agenda that people want to hear about is what was this like on this day when you hit Y&Z? Well, it's not fun, but the issue is that you've got to keep on trying because the public has got to get to the point that they agree that this is an important thing.

Speaker 1: 54:49

Yeah, it's important, it's necessary, and there's some and I say this over and over again there's some extremely amazing people that work behind those fences and walls that nobody ever sees. I've worked with a bunch of them Me too, and I'm learning with this podcast. That's worldwide and I didn't I didn't notice that until I started this podcast, but there's great people working behind walls all over the world doing the same job I did for almost 30 years.

Speaker 2: 55:21

Yeah, when I go out, the one thing I get to see a different jurisdictions is maybe they've done something better than I've seen before, but what you get to see is the dedication of the people who are out there and what they do, and the nurses and the mechanical services, and the food service foreman is the officer. I mean, it's all over the institution where they are showing themselves as wonderful, wonderful people. So, yeah, I always think of amazing folks. I think about the assistant director of nurses, I think about the psychologist who spent Thanksgiving with me one year because we had a person who was swallowing bed springs when we had bed springs. You know, I think about all these people who just do things. People just would not even understand that they're doing it. And they're doing it for one of two reasons they're doing it to keep the institution calm, or they're doing it because they have a desire to make sure people, even inmates, quote-unquote but people go home safe, sure, sure.

Speaker 1: 56:44

Yeah, absolutely. So what are you doing now? You got any projects going right now.

Speaker 2: 56:53

Well, I teach a little bit. I'm teaching a graduate course program evaluation, you know, and I keep just shaking my head because the stuff that we do with correctional officers, they have never been taught, and so my job some of the time is to give them a fast lesson on why they're important. I don't think it makes a difference, but I do it anyway. I work for, I don't work for. I volunteer with a couple of pro bono groups that do reentry. I work with a pro bono group that wants to make prisons safer, and I work with a statewide commissioner with an indigent defense service, and people say why are you working with them? Those are lawyers, yes, but everybody deserves hope.

Speaker 1: 57:54

Yeah absolutely.

Speaker 2: 57:56

One of the things I always said is to a guy who was writing me up, writing a BP-9, I always said I'd much rather them write me up than come in with a knife and try to get to me. Let them have it, Let him write it. If we think we're wrong, we tell him and we give him. We say, yeah, you're right, we're wrong. Nothing, there's no shame. The bottom line is that you've got to show these people that you're going to respect. You've got to show the return of the prison that you're going to respect them and you've got to try to help them. Our recidivism rate is absolutely not comparable in this country and I don't think everybody who leaves prison is wanting to come back to prison. In fact, I don't want to come back to tell the truth. But we don't make it easy on returning citizens. In North Carolina, for example, they give them $45, gate money and that's it. That's it, that's it.

Speaker 2: 59:09

There's very few transitional houses in North Carolina, so most of these people just go home. And I said folks, I go to debt with my wife. It costs more than $50. How do we expect these folks to make it, Especially since typically not always, but they haven't saved any money. There's no way for them there's very few I've had for them to save money and they're going back to a grandma or grandpa or father and mother who really can't afford them. And so what happens? When they're dead? Most of them have children and they have a child and all of a sudden they get a bill for $3,000. Johnny needs a break, and you know he doesn't have health insurance, not that health insurance pays all that.

Speaker 2: 1:00:03

And the guy says, okay, let me go back and do what I'm good at doing. And he goes and sells a cube of drugs. Now do I condone that? Absolutely not. Do I understand it better now than I have before? We've got to figure out, if you're talking about what we need to do for correctional officers. We've got to figure out ways how to keep these people out of the community because they cost a lot of money. Corrections was $8.1 billion last year, or something like that.

Speaker 1: 1:00:37

Yeah, I know it's crazy. On the insurance thing, I interviewed Percy Pitzer a few episodes ago. He's working with a company who's providing insurance for these guys when they're first getting out. So yeah, I mean stuff like that. If we could expand that. Um, and you're right, I don't know how many people I walked out and you give them that last check and it's what's on their commissary and say don't come back, a rent cost 800 bucks minimum somewhere. And you give them that last check and it's what's on their commissary and say don't come back, rent costs $800 minimum somewhere. And then you've got to have first and last for water and you've got to set this up. And a lot of times we are setting up for failure as a society and it's too bad.

Speaker 2: 1:01:22

Yeah, I mean, I don't know where it was. There was some state recently that the legislator passed, legislature passed, that inmates would get $2,500 and the governor vetoed. And I'm sitting there saying, you know, that would have been a perfect case study to see how many of these folks made it when they only got, when they got $2,500, versus the $100 that they used to get. Sure, sure.

Speaker 1: 1:01:51

Yeah, we got a lot of stuff to work on. We do. We always have Always will, always will. Hey, if somebody wants to contact you, do you have an email or something?

Speaker 2: 1:02:03

Sure. My email is afejp at aolcom.

Speaker 1: 1:02:11

Okay, I'll go ahead and put that in the show notes if anybody wants to reach out to you and follow up, but I sure thank you, art, for being on here. I appreciate the conversation. I think people really enjoy hearing not only your experience but some of your thoughts. After 40 years, how many years is it total?

Speaker 2: 1:02:32

Well, it'll be 49 years this year, 49 years. Can I say just one other thing? Sure, and that is, if you're listening to this, never forget your staff. We say that all the time, but from the bottom of my heart, the only reason I was successful was because I had staff that supported me. It was not me, I'm just a dumb old country boy from eastern North Carolina, but it was because my staff supported me. But it was because my staff supported me my staff for the most part after I became a warden. It took me a little while to figure out what I was on that time too, but they would tell me when I was full of crap and that was very valuable, and they would give me ideas on what they needed. It was very valuable, but never, ever, ever, think that you are important. If you're an associate warden or a warden, you have a title but you're not important. Most people out there working their trenches are important. Thank you, mike.

Speaker 1: 1:03:45

Absolutely. I'm going to follow up just a little bit. So I sat down last night and I had been watching uh part of band of brothers and uh, there's that section in there where uh, where buck has been gambling with the ncos and dick winters tells him you know you can't do that, and he goes why? And he said what if you'd won? You should never put yourself in a position that they, that they owe you. You always owe them. Amen, that was a good reminder to to hear that last night. So I think we can all live by that and you're exactly right. Thank you so much, art. I hope you have a great day. Thank you so much, sir. Well, thanks for listening today and before we go, I'd like to take a minute to thank one of our sponsors.

Speaker 1: 1:04:32

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