THE CORRECT WAY: Learning from the Experts If correction is the goal of the correctional system, what kind of a prison would best facilitate that? We asked a handful of Christians with extensive experience in the criminal justice system to share their ideas of what an ideal prison would be like. Mary Leftridge Byrd is the assistant secretary of Offender Treatment and Reentry Programs for the Washington State Department of Corrections. She was formerly the deputy secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, a superintendent at two state correctional institutions in Pennsylvania, and a warden at a women’s prison in Maryland.
percent will. As a superintendent, whenever asked how many inmates I had in my prison, I would answer, “None, but you and I have over a thousand.” Prisons are extensions of — indeed part of—the larger community. It’s not the responsibility just of the prison administration, but of all of us. Prison staff also need compassion from those outside the world of corrections. We are professionals laboring in an arena still often misunderstood in terms of the demands of the environment, the expectations of the public, and living with the possibility that something could go wrong at any minute. While that is true of life in general, serving in a closed, coercive environment where not one prisoner chooses or wants to be exacts a different toll. Competence. A person who steps up to work in or lead a correctional environment has got to be confident and competent and never—I mean never—arrogant. That person has to be able to behave in her own office just as she behaves when walking the tier or the yard. Creativity. Leading a prison is more art than science. At one point in my life, I thought about being an events planner; add to that my passion for the arts, reading, and lifelong learning and a keen interest in observing people and their behavior, and it makes for a great pallet from which to do this work. For years I thought I could change people, but over three decades of corrections I’ve come to understand that a large part of my job is to create an environment where men and women can choose for themselves to make changes. There is no question in my mind that I have been called to the administration of justice and to create a place of possibility and hope, a place that confronts and never minimizes horrific behavior, a place that never forgets the chaos and crisis visited on victims of crime, a place of accountability and change. For me, that’s the essence of “corrections.”
I’d rather talk about an ideal community, albeit a coercive one, than an ideal prison. We may be talking about what are commonly known as rules, regulations, and procedures, but framing these necessary boundaries as “community standards” changes the atmosphere, which then changes the culture, which then changes the conditions in the prison. The following guiding principles are, I believe, essential to a healthy community in prison. Order without oppression. We cannot have security without programs any more than we can have programs without security. Good security practices should, in part, be based on order emanating from mutual respect and a high level of inmate/staff communication. Candor. The administration needs to have the courage to say what needs to be said, clearly, respectfully, and persistently. Compassion. We have an obligation to treat folks the way we would want to be treated in similar circumstances. Compassion means infusing the prison culture with possibility and hope.When inmates and staff regard and engage each other with respect, no one loses. After I buried my mother, I received hundreds of cards and other expressions of sympathy from the inmates. We often act as if incarcerated men and women will never return to communities, but in fact nationally over 90
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