The Camille Institution
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In 1977, Camille Camp became the first female warden of a maximum-security men’s prison in the United States. In honor of her contributions to the corrections industry, the state of South Carolina recently dedicated a prison in her name. Throughout her career, working with both juvenile and adult inmates, Camp implemented programs to improve living conditions and increase personal responsibility in an effort to curb recidivism rates. Her approach has always been to be tough, but it’s equally important to be fair, firm, and friendly. |
Jay Schneider: Can you tell us how you discovered your career path?
Camille Camp: I started out as a school teacher and for a while I worked in a deprived area in South Carolina with a lot of underprivileged children, a lot of delinquents, and I found myself ministering to them and trying to work things out with them. I got so interested in all their problems; I was just fascinated and dismayed at what was going on with them and I started working with them so much that I decided to go to graduate school and get a degree in guidance counseling.
Actually, what I did was get a degree in counseling psychology. And, for my practicum-or internship-I waited around and didn’t get one of the guidance counselor positions in a school so I had to go to the Manning Correctional Institution to do my internship. Again, I ran into the same troubled populations, only these were men.
I was successful in finishing the internship, except before I made a success of it, I failed miserably because the inmates talked me into giving them quarters for their cigarettes and chewing gum and things like that. I thought I was doing good, but do-gooders don’t make it in prison. I was braking the rules and I didn’t know it. The warden called me in and told me he was going to have to let me go. He said “You know, you seem like a nice, very bright young woman but I can’t have this. If you could channel your abilities in the right way and if you could get tough, you could do wonders in this business.”
I just resolved that I was never going to do anything other than tow the line. I wanted so very much to work with these people so I did whatever was necessary to be able to continue working, and it was a whopping success. So much so, that I was asked to go to a boys and girls co-ed group reformatory in South Carolina. I did extremely well there and then was asked to run the lockup for the boys, which is unusual because security people usually do that, but I was given it because I was very tough.
The lockup had been having riots and violence and runaways and I knocked it out. I got a lot of publicity and had people come from other states to see what I was doing so they could emulate the programs. I set up programs that are like a therapeutic community, where everybody was working together and everybody was responsible for everybody else, as well as themselves, and they thrived under that. That’s really what made the difference.
JS: Under what timeframe did you enact those changes?
CC: It was pretty quick, within six months. I just felt like nothing had been done correctly. I had gotten tired of seeing the kids manhandled and hit by the officers, so I fired a lot of them and that sent the message out and immediately cut down on the violence.
I also realized the kids had too much time on their hands, time to sit around and plot escapes and time for petty things between them to give rise to violence. So I put in programs and I had churches come in and make special meals for them. I got a rock band from the local university to come in and play for them, I had art teachers come in, and I had a regular school going on in there.
JS: After working at the boys lockup, is that when you were promoted to warden of the maximum-security male facility?
CC: I tried and tried to get that job. There were three guys before me who got the job instead of me. Every time I went up for promotion I was always told that some guy needed the job because “He has a wife and two children” or “Women can’t do this because they’re going to get killed and that will cause all kinds of press” or “Your hair is too long” or any number of things. At the time, my hair was down to my knees and I wasn’t about to cut it. I was assaulted more than a couple times, but I never did get my hair pulled.
But, those were always excuses and I just kept on and on. The last time that I applied to be the warden of the maximum-security prison, which just kept having turnover because nobody could run it, my commissioner asked me, “Are you going to sue me?” I said, “No, I’m not going to sue you, I’m just going to wear you out.” So, he had to take my name before the board of trustees and they had to vote before I could go in-this was the first time this had ever been done. And, they voted me in.
All the kids I had worked with in the juvenile institution, most of them were there now [in the adult, maximum-security prison]. I believe you can do a lot to change people’s lives when they’re in prison, but unless they have a support system on the outside, they tend to go right back to criminal behavior. And, when I walked into the maximum-security prison, they knew that “mama” was here now-a lot of them called me mama-and they spread the word that you don’t mess with her! It’s not healthy. So, I didn’t have a hard time at all and I put a lot of the same things into the maximum-security prison as I had done in the boy’s lockup. I wasn’t [at the maximum-facility prison] terribly long, but I made a huge mark while I was there.
JS: You were warden for only one year when you left in 1978 to become deputy director of adult services with Arizona’s DOC; why did you make the change so quickly?
CC: The commissioner of Arizona asked me to go out there because there was so much violence at the Arizona State Prison. I ran the whole adult system-prisons, parole, and community services.
I put in a lot of things. There was no grievance procedure for the inmates. I put that in so they would have ways of getting their complaints settled other than through violence. I put in a new disciple system I thought was fair and more consistent, and that I know did a lot of good. You can tell by the lower number of inmates who were locked up for disciplinary actions. A lot of the things they did were not things that called for lockup, they just called for the loss of privileges and things like that.
I also built a new prison; I founded a training academy for officers, which gave them college credit; and I established educational programs there with the community college. I cleaned up the place and I broke up some Mafia rackets. I sent 19 really bad gangsters to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. When the New Mexico riots occurred in Santa Fe, they sent me all the guys who did the killing and I locked them up and was able to hold them and keep them from committing any more crimes.
JS: What do you think makes a good warden?
CC: Fair, firm, and friendly. The three “Fs.” If you’re fair and consistent-meting out whatever type of treatment you give in a fair and unbiased way-inmates sense that and they cherish you for that. If you’re firm, they know what the limits are; the boundaries are set. And, if you’re friendly, you do everything with a smile and treat them the way you would like to be treated and speak to them the way you would like to be spoken to. But you have to be on your toes. You have to have intelligence coming in constantly. Not snitches, but intelligence.
JS: What’s the difference between a snitch and someone providing intelligence?
CC: What happens is that inmates, if they cherish you, want to protect you because they value anyone who’s fair, firm, and friendly. What happens is you get these “kites,” we call them, and put one in every cellblock and inmates put suggestions and information in there. A lot of people call them the warden’s “love notes.” The kites are taken out and reviewed.
A good example is, one inmate, I don’t know who, send a kite to me and told me that when I took my next tour on tier three of a certain cell block, an inmate in cell nine had a shiv waiting for me and that he was going to ask me to come to the bars and then was going to kill me. That same week some flowers were sent to me in a funeral wreath.
I checked who was in cell nine and it was a guy who was pretty psychologically disturbed and he was in there because he stabbed some correctional officers and I never really got too close to him. I immediately connected the threat with the funeral wreath and I went down by his cell and stopped, maybe three cells over, and I had my squad of officers and when I gave them the signal I wanted to ambush the cell, get him out, and look in the place the inmate told me the shiv was going to be. And they pulled that shiv out and it’s right in the room with me now. I kept it all these years as a reminder to be careful.
JS: How did your involvement with the Criminal Justice Institute (CJI) begin?
CC: I met my husband [George Camp, founder of CJI] at a conference that I was hosting in Phoenix. I was giving a big woman’s-lib talk. One of his openers to me was that I ought not to be burning my bra in public because it was going to ruin my career. But, I married him and I’ve been burning my bra ever since.
JS: The CJI has been publishing The Corrections Yearbook for 22 years now, starting in 1980. What happened 22 years ago that lead to the publication of the annual yearbooks?
CC: I was there for the 1982 Corrections Yearbook [after leaving the Arizona DOC]. The first book was 20 pages long-just a little pamphlet almost. The next one was a little bit larger.
I’ve always been interested in doing stuff like that, but when I came, my husband said we’re not making any money off this and wanted to chuck it. I wanted to do it, so I made the survey questionnaire longer and included more meaningful data. I kept enlarging it every year and at one point it was four different volumes. And now I’ve made it a much larger book, but I’m honing it down to one book. The other books-jail and juvenile-will be on our Web site. It just evolves over the years.
JS: What are some of the projects you’ve undertaken at the Criminal Justice Institute?
CC: One of the things we’ve been doing recently is helping correctional systems set up therapeutic communities, and that’s been extremely interesting to me because I started out doing something similar. Now it’s becoming a science.
A therapeutic community is a structured environment where inmates, usually substance abusers, live and are accountable to one another. It’s about being responsible for your behavior. The communities are self-governing with lots of supervision. Everyone has to tell their story and confess their abuse. They have to talk about whatever it is they’re doing that’s unhealthy, that violates others.
They have retreats where for three or four days at a time the whole community is together, working together. There are small therapy groups, activities, rituals, affirmation, just about anything you can think of that’s really good for dealing with behavior and self esteem. It’s just not run like a regular Department of Correction’s facility.
There are systems now where therapeutic communities absolutely just change behavior. They foster cleanliness, politeness, industry, all those things. There are some systems, like in California, where they are trying to include therapeutic communities everywhere, not just for substance abuse. They’re great management tools-fair, firm, and friendly.
They are very difficult to establish, but we have people in our firm, that’s what they do. They’re in the substance abuse area and they go out-and I’ve done it myself-and we start working with staff and little by little we get them trained, put them in a therapeutic community for immersion training, and after they know what it’s like to be an inmate in a therapeutic community, you can add inmates to the group.
It takes a lot of commitment and a lot of risk on their part because they’re used to treating inmates in the old military way. This is diametrically opposed to that, and it works. What happens is that when officers who don’t think they want to be in a therapeutic community actually see how the inmates are behaving-washing the walls, cleaning the floors, not arguing, not yelling curse words, not doing anything like that-next thing you know, they want to get in a therapeutic community.
JS: Do you ever hear complaints about the inmates receiving treatment that is too lenient, with regards to the therapeutic communities?
CC: All you have to do is invite people, such as legislators, to the community, ask them to come anytime, nothing will be staged, just come out and spend a day in the community. They come and see inmates cleaning, they see them working hard, they see that they’re neat, the uniforms are nice, well kempt, and they wonder why aren’t all prisoners like this? This is the way things ought to be run.
JS: In the course of your research and studies, what results or findings have surprised you?
CC: The way people talk so much about violence, I was surprised that there weren’t more deaths by violence.
Over the years, that’s always been something I’ve told people about. I’ve always worked around maximum security and in my career was surrounded by an extreme amount of violence.
When I started doing The Corrections Yearbook, it surprised me that they weren’t more violet deaths. It just shows you that even correction’s people can think there’s more violence and violent deaths than there are. That is all you ever hear. When you go to conferences and talk with other people, they tell you about those murders and deaths more than they tell you about anything good that’s going on. You get a skewed point of view.
JS: What most frustrates you about the correctional industry? What encourages you?
CC: What frustrates me is that the stigma given to an inmate becomes a stereotype for all the correctional agencies. Everyone wants to lock them up, but no one wants to support keeping them alive and they certainly don’t want to support programming.
So they’re locking up more and more people who are coming back to jail. What’s been done and what’s been supported with funding just hasn’t worked. It’s a vicious cycle that just keeps going on and on and on.
They need to plan educational things, recreation programs, but they can’t afford it because they’re spending all their money on prisons. And, while they are willing to do it in order to play the political games, they resent doing, so they cut corrections budgets while still being able to tout that they are taking care of the community. It’s frustrating to watch that and see it happen.
The thing that encourages me the most is that in recent years, there seems to be a few, bright politicians and government officials who realize they need to do more community work, programs, restitution, restorative justice, and those kinds of things instead of locking people. They know they can’t just keep building bricks and mortar and spending the money it takes to put inmates up each year. It takes tens of thousands of dollars to bed and board somebody who you’re not making any change in and who most likely will return to prison after being released.
JS: What trends are you noticing within corrections, positive and negative? What issues are “hot topics” these days?
CC: Always violence, assaults, and escapes. We get calls from CNN, ABC, CBS, whenever there’s a big prison riot or great big problem. A year ago I was interviewed by Tom Brokaw about the prison breaks in Texas. We also get a lot of calls about privatization.
JS: On May 9, 2002, the state of South Carolina named a prison after you. How do you feel about that?
CC: Well, I couldn’t believe it when it happened and I immediately started thinking of all the other people it should have been named after other than myself. I was embarrassed. I kept thinking “Why me?” and my husband kept saying, “Why not?”
My family was very proud and that made me feel real good. The speeches from my two brothers and sister at the dedication-those three speeches meant more to me than just about anything about it. You always want your family to feel the full effect of what you do.
I’m trying to give back now at the Camille Graham Institution [At the time she was a warden in South Carolina, her name was Camille Graham]. There are a lot of officers who would love to get an education and I’ve set up a little scholarship fund to pay the tuition for one officer each year to go back to school. I’m going to get a lot of reward out of that.
JS: What are your impressions of women’s roles in corrections? Is there still a gender bias?
CC: Yeah, there is. I think when a woman goes up for a position, she’s scrutinized a whole lot more than a man, especially going into a men’s institution.
JS: What advice would you give to women working in or interested in a correctional career?
CC: Don’t try to act like a man, be who you are and know your stuff. Be fair, firm, and friendly. Don’t think of yourself as being inferior, don’t think you can’t do it, or you’re not going to make it. Do your job and do it well. Do it better!
