Right Sizing: 002 Committee In Action

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By Chris Carden

Published: 08/26/2002

In a cramped conference room in the administration building of the New Jersey Department of Corrections (NJDOC) headquarters, the weekly meeting of the 002 Committee is a round table of smiles and good humor. The committee members, charged in December 2000 with right sizing the department's custody operations and developing Best Practices, even make jokes at each other's expense, but the light tone accompanies a hard charging commitment to purpose.

'It's the art of compromise,' said Frank Gripp, former division of operations director and former committee chairman, who handpicked committee members from divergent fields of corrections management: administration and custody. 'I tried to choose people with ideas, who are aggressive, and who don't keep their mouths shut,' Gripp joked. But the approach is effective. The committee's staffing recommendations have reduced custody overtime costs by 53% since fiscal year 2000.

That year, costs were flying high at $71 million. As of FY 02, the department is putting costs in a nosedive, spending just $33.5 million with an eye towards lowering the expenditures even further.

Newly appointed director and chairman Joseph Butler puts his plan simply:

'To reduce overtime spending to $25 million dollars by the end of this fiscal year. To monitor the overtime expenditures and FTE's at each of the 14 institutions in the department,' he says. 'My approach is to review the non-baseline jobs worked for each pay period. After review, I sent each affected administrator a memo asking them to provide a explanation or justification in writing of the overtime hours incurred. I also asked them if there is anyway to curtail or decrease the numbers of hours used for the respective areas.'

This approach has helped facility administrators to re-consider what overtime represents for their staff and the department.

'If you treat your staff appropriately, they come to work,' adds committee member Captain Larry Glover. 'If you staff the institutions appropriately, if you balance the days off, you don't have overtime. Overtime is not the problem, it's the symptom.'

The committee's purpose, then, is an all-out assault on mismanagement at every level of administration and operations. It looks to find what works in areas as wide ranging as policy, housing, wages, training, and security. Yet its central focus is staffing.

The 002 Committee (which gets its name from the DOC paperwork required to make staffing changes) made headway by employing three main initiatives in line with New Jersey Governor James McGreevey's Best Practices to increase greater efficiency in government:

* A post-by-post analysis to determine appropriate staffing levels;
* Development of a computerized baseline reporting system to allow continual monitoring of staffing assignments by post, shift and day, and;
* An enhanced recruiting and training schedule to help fill position counts to required staffing levels.

And with the goal of right sizing and further overtime reduction, the committee has also ensured that each of the NJDOC's 14 adult facilities have been provided with the management tools to stay on course to ensure that those goals are reached in the next fiscal year. A boost in computer technology, for example, allows prison administrators and committee members to see, at the touch of a button, all baseline staffing assignments, daily housing population reports and daily and bi-weekly overtime reports per institution. Staff numbers on maintenance, food service and custody officers, are all available for instant review, which allows for instant adjustments.

'Traditionally,' Glover says, 'corrections ran like a mom and pop store: you came in, you hired your friends, you gave them a prison and they went out and did whatever they wanted to do. Once we got the tools allowing us to monitor the institutions, we exercised more control of the day-to-day operations.'

More control translates into centralized policy making. The committee is reluctant to talk about future plans, but common to the changes to come is the idea of a paradigm shift -- a change in culture from largely autonomous facilities to a fully integrated system.

'Everybody has to be on the same page,' said Gripp. 'We have to be better at learning how decisions make an impact, how a decision made on your left affects the decision on the right. You can't make decisions in a vacuum in this department anymore. What you tell one administrator has to be followed up with every administrator. Everything has to be questioned.'

It's this approach that led to the restructuring of the entire department's bed space. At its height, NJDOC's population numbers swelled to more than 30,000 inmates. Since the committee's inception two years ago, the department has closed 730 temporary beds that were created in response to population increases. These beds were in areas either considered to be in poor physical condition or in areas previously utilized as program space. Based on an intensive review at each institution, several specialized housing units (i.e. mental health treatment and administrative segregation units) were consolidated or relocated, existing cells were double bunked, and other housing areas were refurbished to create additional space. As a result, 519 additional general population beds were made available and are occupied. And at one youth correctional facility, such restructuring has led to a significant reduction in assaults, another example of the interconnected nature of prison management.

'A lot of the recommendations we've made have really been better operationally,' said 002 member Robert Worden. 'At Albert C. Wagner Youth Correctional Facility, where it was crowded, and we made it into a more dormitory setting with less inmates, we now have [fewer] incidents and it's easier to manage the population.

'So, although people look at us and say we're just trying to cut costs, we're really just trying to manage better because it's less costly.'

'We've changed the department to [ensure] a more efficient, safer, more secure, more cost-effective way of doing business,' adds Gripp, whose committee is taking a no holds barred approach to implementing change. 'I've stood up in the middle of meetings, called an administrator and said 'You've had the time to change that. Do it now.' I think that has set the tone and it has worked.'

*Chris Carden is the Public Information Officer for the New Jersey Department of Corrections. For more information on the 002 Committee, contact him at: Chris.Carden@doc.state.nj.us.

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