Corrections and the Next 250: Developing a Shared Vision for Corrections

Throughout America’s celebration of its 250th anniversary, we’ve been in a reflective stance, looking backwards on everything that has happened in our country’s history. In the field of corrections, looking backwards reveals countless ways that corrections leaders must retrofit century-old infrastructure, policies, and workforce models to solve challenges those systems were never designed to handle. 

Recognizing how hard and important it is to design for the future, despite the constraints of the past, Recidiviz and The Just Trust convened corrections leaders, funders, and ecosystem partners to have a forward-looking conversation about corrections and the next 250 years. Ana Zamora, founder and CEO of The Just Trust, kicked off the evening by encouraging the group to have a generative conversation—with each group lending its expertise and ideas. Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America Fund, offered a framework for this generative conversation, distinguishing between the work of maintaining the current system, the harder work of transforming it, and the long horizon towards building something genuinely new. 

Rob Jeffreys, Director of the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services and President of the Correctional Leaders Association, then pinpointed the most essential question in corrections today: “What is corrections actually for? Historically, we’ve bounced between a few answers: punishment, deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation. Most systems claim to do all four, but in practice, those goals often compete with one another.” 
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Rob proposed a subtle, but powerful reframe. He encouraged the leaders gathered that evening to think of the purpose of corrections through the lens of the question, “How do we improve people successfully?”

Together, the group used this question to reimagine what a fundamentally different corrections system could look like, one that better serves communities and helps people improve.

Over the course of the evening, key themes emerged: 

1. Centering “behavior change” as the core objective of corrections staff

Several directors spoke to challenges in attracting and retaining corrections staff, and how corrections training curricula are still largely based on standards from the 1970s or 80s. At the same time, many states struggle with high staff vacancy rates, while others have closed the gap through pilot leadership programs that are helping to shift corrections towards a rehabilitative model. 

Bree Derrick, Director of the Idaho Department of Correction, challenged the group to think differently about who corrections should hire. What would it look like for corrections to focus more on recruiting career changers—people with backgrounds in customer service or sales and expertise reading or de-escalating people? That same outside-of-the-box hiring could apply to leadership, optimizing for those candidates with strong critical thinking and decision making skills. 

Directors painted a picture of what a stronger, more effective corrections workforce could look like—one that offers staff a clear career ladder with upward mobility, embraces a culture of feedback and change management, and brings in new staff with expertise in mental health and wellness to address common pain points. Overall, directors spoke to the need to actively seek out people who believe that behavior change is possible and that the role of staff is to help make it happen. 

Wayne Salisbury, former director of the Rhode Island Department of Corrections, shared, “We often hold people who are incarcerated to a higher bar than we do ourselves. We’re looking to improve behavior, not for perfection.”

2. When corrections leverages connections, it doesn’t have to be the system of last resort 

Directors spoke to the impossible asks made of today’s corrections staff. The public and legislators often misunderstand what corrections is responsible for and what the work looks like in practice. A corrections officer wears multiple hats: corrections officer, yes, but also case manager, mental health counselor, substance use counselor, job coach, family mediator, and housing navigator. They are asked to fill responsibilities beyond their job descriptions, often without sufficient support or training, while enduring workplace violence rates twice those of police officers, making the job unsustainable over time. 

Because corrections is the system of last resort, it absorbs the work of healthcare, housing, employment, and education—often without the mandate, funding, or interagency relationships to do that work well.  

This shows up in concrete ways: people released on parole are citizens, but often lack equal access to services available to other citizens. And for people who are ready to leave prison but need placement in a group home or nursing facility, community members get priority—meaning people can remain incarcerated simply because no bed can be found.

As Director Heidi Washington of the Michigan Department of Corrections shared, “We’re the end of the line. We need a conversation about how we elevate our population to be at least equal to others. That way, we’re not duplicating services.”

Imagine what corrections could look like if medical care didn’t operate separately within corrections, but was integrated with the broader health care system, or if a person who earned college credits inside could actually use them on the outside. Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated people was restored in 2023, yet many states are still underutilizing prison education programs because the government technology to connect incarcerated individuals to Federal Student Aid doesn't work.

If agencies worked collaboratively—sharing data, aligning services, and treating justice-involved populations as a shared responsibility—corrections departments wouldn't have to build parallel systems from scratch.

3. Corrections as a field must develop a shared north star to build toward

Several directors spoke about the need for a shared agenda, or north star, that corrections departments across states could work toward. As Dr. Ryan Thornell, Director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry, noted, “We need to create a unified vision across the field of corrections. We’re all driving change differently, which creates a lot of fragmentation.”

By the end of the evening, that north star began to take shape: corrections as a part of a continuum of care, supported by multi-agency collaboration and staffed by a workforce that believes behavior change is possible. In this vision, corrections departments would move beyond failure metrics like recidivism towards success metrics that support reentry—employment, housing stability, and community connection.

Today’s corrections systems are designed to mitigate risk, which means it’s often difficult to transform for the future. A shared north star doesn’t eliminate risk completely, but it allows the field to take risks together and reduce the chance of failure for any single department. 

This is no easy feat. As Dr. Beth Skinner, Director of the Iowa Department of Corrections noted, “We have to change hearts and minds, and put faces to names and numbers. But it can be done.”