Roundtable: Changing Staff Culture in Corrections: Practical Realities and Evaluation Challenges

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract/Description

This roundtable brings together practitioner-scholars -- including a lawyer, a doctor, and a correctional official -- with academics, to discuss the challenges of evaluating staff culture inside correctional facilities (especially at high security facilities) and the possibilities for reform, growing out of both evaluations and other public-private, academic-professional collaborations including an international immersion program for correctional staff called JUSTInnovate run by UC San Francisco. Topics will include both research project experiences, and initiatives started in Pennsylvania, Washington, Oregon, and California prisons, as well as the potential for change through international prison staff exchange programs.

Sub Unit

• Area XI. Roundtables

Individual Presentations

• We need a (new) hero: Reimagining the meaning of prison work - Jody Sundt, Indiana University Indianapolis

• Scapegoating Culture in Carceral Organizations - Danielle S. Rudes, George Mason University

• Looking for expertise in all the wrong places: re-thinking who has evidence to contribute to evidence-based practice - Keramet Reiter, University of California, Irvine; Kelsie Chesnut, University of California, Irvine

• Correctional officer health and evaluation of a culture change program targeted to officers - Brie Williams, University of California, San Francisco

Chair

• Keramet Reiter, University of California, Irvine

Discussants

• Don Specter, Prison Law Office

• Bret Bucklen, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections