Within correctional facilities, distinct organizational cultures develop over time, taking their shape from staff attitudes, employee and inmate conduct, and even historical incidents.  But for some prisons and jails that struggle with consistent operational problems involving inmates, staff, management, or a combination of those forces, their cultures can become unhealthy, leaving their organizational values and visions jaded.

Across the country, institutions facing issues associated with organizational culture have turned to the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) for assistance. And, thanks to NIC's Institutional Culture Initiative (ICI), many federal and state prisons and large jails have gotten the guidance they need to shift their organizational cultures and improve their efficiency.

The ICI started about four years ago after NIC began receiving requests from practitioners for assistance regarding the problems they faced in their facilities, including violence and staff sexual misconduct.

"[There was] a host of somewhat nagging problems that just didn't seem to respond to the more traditional methods of addressing such issues," said George Camp, Principal, Criminal Justice Institute (CJI), the organization contracted by NIC to conduct the Assessment of Institutional Culture Project.

When staff training and awareness initiatives and technical assistance did not help certain prisons and jails overcome their cultural problems, NIC went a step further to create the ICI to focus specifically on aiding agencies to improve operations at their most problematic facilities. 

"What they thought might be going on is there might be in some of these institutions a component of the culture or, the culture as a whole was in such a state of disarray, that it was supporting these behaviors," Camp said.  "They began to think [that] if they could get at the values and beliefs of the organization and begin attending to them, that might be the way to improve, not just the culture, but, the operation [of] the facilities."

CJI joined into an agreement with NIC to do just that: go into correctional facilities and get at the core of what makes them tick.  Since 2000, the consulting firm has sent assessment teams into 20 prisons and jails from coast to coast to research past incidents, talk to staff and observe the way things run.

The assessments are conducted using a protocol developed by CJI that identifies which elements and issues are important to examine and assess in order to discern a true picture of a facility's culture.  CJI teams collect information using a variety of methods. 

"[We] developed a means of going out into an institution for a week with a team of four to six people and assessing the culture of that prison using a series of focus group interviews and observations.  [We] really began to get at the myths and the oral history of the organization as well as, of course, the written history. We really began to understand the values and beliefs of the people who worked there as well as tapping into the inmate culture," Camp said.

According to Camp, CJI creates focus groups with random samples of different staff groups, including line staff, managers and non-corrections employees.  The sessions last nearly two hours, during which time they reveal their feelings and beliefs about the facility in which they work.  Their responses are kept anonymous, but not confidential, as they are an important part of the final recommendations the assessment team makes to the warden of the facility.

In addition to the focus groups, CJI administers questionnaires to the staff and observes activities within the facility.  According to Camp, the assessment week is intense, with teams spending between 16 and 18 hours a day in the prisons or the jails.

"When [we are] not at [the] site, we are working together sharing what we have learned during the day," Camp said.  "It's very much an interactive process where we build on what we have learned the hour before [and] the day before, so that by the end, [we can] share with the warden our assessment of that culture or prison."

At the end of the week, CJI's preliminary recommendations to the facility leadership are based upon what the assessors discovered about the organizational culture of the facility.  Soon after, the firm issues a formal report for wardens to use as a guide when implementing changes in their facilities.

Making Changes in California

In systems where these assessments have occurred, CJI's recommendations have helped facility managers to implement new practices and procedures to drive a cultural shift.  According to John Dovey, Chief Deputy Director for Field Operations with the California Department of Corrections (CDC), CJI's culture assessment made all the difference in improving operations at the state's women's prison.

"Instantly [after the assessment] we could see what the devil was going on in that institution," said Dovey, who was Warden of the California Institution for Women at the time of the assessment. 

When Dovey first arrived at the facility, it was reeling from one of the largest staff sexual misconduct investigations in the department's history.  During the investigation and CDC's attempt to weed out those staff members who had engaged in inappropriate conduct, he had a sense that something was a little bit off in the institution.

"As time went on, I could sort of feel there was a presence in the institution that I just could not quite put my hands around," said Dovey.  "You could feel it, but you couldn't see it."

In search of some answers, Dovey turned to NIC and, soon after, the California Institution for Women was selected as the sixth prison in the country to participate in the ICI.  In February of 2003, one of CJI's assessment teams descended upon the facility for a week and after hearing what the team leaders had to say, Dovey had a new perspective on the institution.

"They described our institution in ways that we could see almost immediately why the institution functioned the way it did," said Dovey, who likened the experience to putting on polarized sunglasses that enable you to see things that ordinary sunglasses do not.

Most importantly, the assessment helped Dovey to recognize that there were competing forces within the institution.  And, there were ways that tasks were supposed to be done --based on rules and regulations -- that were not the way that tasks were really being accomplished, because the institutional culture supported processes and procedures that were not in concert with those dictated by policy.

"As long as there were no changes, then each side, whether it be staff or inmates, found ways of not only getting things done, but getting their needs met," Dovey said.  "And the culture resisted any kind of forced change."

According to Dovey, the assessment team found that there were many characteristics of the facility's culture, including trauma, mutual accommodation, over-sexualization, over-familiarization, powerlessness, complacency, boundary permeability, inconsistency, poor communication and technotogy - or, a lack of technology.

Among the products of these characteristics were staff unhappiness, uneasiness and resentment, inmates and staff doing favors for each other, a lack of social distance between inmates and staff and "an almost universal feeling of powerlessness," said Dovey.

Other issues included contraband in the facility, a careless enforcement of the rules and poor communication between staff members, he added.  But, despite the facility's problems, the assessment team was confident that operations could be turned around.

"With strong leadership and inclusive processes, they felt we could change the culture," Dovey said.

To implement a culture change at the facility, Dovey decided that he had to start off slow; he began by asking CJI to come in and explain to the staff what it had found during its assessment and why changes were necessary.

"I didn't want it to come from me," Dovey said.  "I wanted it to come from the outside, because obviously there was little trust at the time."

For two and a half days, staff attended "town hall-like meetings" at the prison, where they learned about the assessment and what issues were going on at the prison.

"It's a place where many of us spend many of our lives on a daily basis, so it's important we know what's going on before we can change it," Dovey said.

Once staff was informed about what the assessors had found, changes began to take place, starting with the inmates.

Dovey met with the prison's Women's Advisory Council, which is comprised of inmates, to tell them that certain things, like manipulating staff members would no longer be tolerated. 

"[You're in for] the biggest change you've ever seen," he told them.  "We are going to change.  Staff at this prison are going to start working together," he added.  "Many of them thought that their world as they knew had ended."

And the staff members got the message about the culture change loud and clear, too, at a picnic that was held at the prison for employees and their families.

"[It was] the funeral for the old culture and the birth of the new culture," Dovey said.  "We wanted to make sure that the staff knew that we were onto something new."

In addition, a "change team" was created to examine operational issues.  According to Dovey, they kept him informed of their progress and made recommendations as to what procedural changes would be effective in helping to shift the prison's culture.

As of last summer, when Dovey left the facility to assume his current position with the CDC, he was confident that the atmosphere at the prison had become healthier.

"I felt like that prison had turned the corner and there was good staff in place," he said.

And, last December, NIC worked with the prison again, sending in another assessment team to reevaluate the culture there, Dovey said.  Its findings proved conclusively that the culture had, indeed, improved, he added.

"This was an absolutely invaluable experience for us," Dovey said.  "No one likes talking about the bad things that go on, but unless you shine a light on [them], you are never going to be able to [change]."

Setting Up a Strategic Plan

Another facility where changes are taking place as a result of an NIC culture assessment is Westville Correctional Facility in Indiana.  There, administrators are currently in the process of creating a strategic plan for implementing changes that will help to improve the way the facility is run.

After the assessment, which took place in 2001, the facility became NIC's pilot project for strategic planning, according to John Schrader, Assistant Superintendent of the prison. 

"In a prison setting, we've been trying to look at how to plan strategically, rather than just operationally," Schrader said.  "The key element was what we could do to try to shift our culture towards the desired culture."

What the assessment found to be the culture that best suited the facility was one in which staff interacted more like a family.

"Their culture assessment showed that, primarily, the facility wanted somewhat of a less hierarchical structure and more of family-type culture," Schrader said.

Other suggestions made to the facility were to build a greater trust there and to find ways to better serve and take advantage of the prison's external stakeholders.

While they are still in the process of defining issues and creating plans to address them, the facility has put together six teams, with 10-15 employees on each, to focus on specific problems.

"Those teams addressed a series of questions and spent a lot of time getting together with staff within the facility," Schrader said.

The teams were responsible for tackling issues regarding resources, the expectations of the leaders of the facility, and the vision for the prison.

"A big one that took quite a while was developing the facility's vision of its future," Schrader said.  "[They] went through several rewrites and kept going back out to the staff and kept working at that until we finally had what we feel is a good vision statement that the staff is pretty well in agreement on saying where we want to be in the future."

Aside from the vision statement, other changes will be made at the facility in coming months, after the strategic planning process has been completed, Schrader said.  He added that part of the strategic plan accounts for an evaluative measure, which will be created to determine if the changes that are being implemented are helping to improve Westville's culture.

Putting the Wheels of Change in Motion

At both Westville and the California Institution for Women, the cultural assessments formed the basis for many changes at the facilities to improve operations there.  According to Camp, that is a key factor: managers must take the information from the assessments and do something with it.

"The real value in all of this work comes from what the agency or the institution does with the report, [and] to what extent they are able to bring about cultural change," Camp said.  "In that regard we also have assisted a number of states in bringing about change and NIC has developed a range of options that they make available to an institution after the assessment is done."

According to Camp, if agencies utilize these resources and set their sights on implementing the recommendations made after the assessment, it is possible to change the organizational culture of a correctional facility.

"People can reshape an organization or an institution.  We know just in corrections alone that there are some prisons even within the same system that seem to function at a much higher level than others and the values and beliefs that are held there apparently are more in keeping with the ones we'd like to have them hold," Camp said.  "We have examples of it everywhere, but, like any sort of relationship between people, they either get better or get worse.  The one thing we know is [that] they never stay the same so that you constantly have to work on it," he added. "Otherwise it will deteriorate as you are a part of it.  You just can't sit still.  You have to constantly peddle your bicycle.  There's no coasting allowed."

Resources:

To learn more about NIC's ICI, go to www.nicic.org

To contact CJI call 860-704-6400.

For information about California's prisons, call CDC at 916-445-4950.

To reach Westville Correctional Facility call 317-232-5715.