A Session with the New Head of California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

Heading California’s prison system, one of the largest in the nation, is no easy task. After several recent scandals the department that oversees state-run correctional facilities reorganized July 1 to put a greater emphasis on rehabilitation and adopted a new name, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (previously California Department of Corrections). But even as reforms continue, a stream of bad press and unfortunate events has plagued the system in recent months: The department’s health care system recently was put in federal receivership; this summer San Quentin prison had its first fatal death row overdose and its largest prison riot in 20 years; and prison unions (a powerful lobby in the state) are at odds with the department’s top administrators. The list goes on. About a month after he took the reins as secretary of the department, Roderick Hickman met with Correctional News at his Sacramento office to discuss the state of corrections in California.

Correctional News: The corrections system in California is facing problems on multiple fronts. What are some of the key components that led to the current situation?

Roderick Hickman: I think one of the key issues that has driven us to where we are at currently in both the adult and juvenile arenas of corrections is that we didn’t have a well-established strategic process for providing services to the taxpayers. That meant that unilateral decisions made within departments and by policy makers didn’t always fully take into account the consequences and collateral results of those decisions.

We have ongoing litigation in both the juvenile and adult spheres that is driving home to us how, in hindsight, we could have avoided problems by doing things differently. That would have allowed us to do things more inexpensively and with more control – abilities we’ve lost because of litigation. The other thing that I think has happened with these litigations is we haven’t been doing an adequate job of managing and resolving them. They’ve become a part of the fabric of the organization. So, we have to manage those litigations with the intent to getting past them. The fabric of the organization is the operational result of whatever that litigation was, and than you move on. You no longer want the court driving the organization.

I think some of the management of our collective bargaining activities has driven us to the place where we are now. We don’t exert, or haven’t in the past exerted, enough management courage and we haven’t really managed our labor organizations as well as we should.

CN: You’ve taken some heat from the unions for making comments like that. With regard to the department’s reorganization, how has that rift affected the way things have moved along?

RH: You describe it as a ‘rift.’ I describe it as my having continually attempted to have dialogue with the union and to communicate to them, and them just refusing to listen. I don’t know how it has impacted us, quite frankly, from a reorganization standpoint. I think it’s taken us a little bit longer to communicate the necessity for the reorganization and its intended results, both internally and external, based upon the influence that the CCPOA [California Correctional Peace Officers Association] in particular has had in both respects.

I think one of the key elements of the reorganization that has taken place is that we now have established correctional leaders who are the voice and face of California corrections. And those people, who are now leading California corrections, are not the same people who are collective bargaining people.

I think the union has a place. I think all unions have a place. I think they have an appropriate place, but I don’t think that a reference to corrections in California has to be at the same time a reference to the CCPOA. They’re two separate entities. We had to separate those entities, and I think the reorganization has done that.

But we also took the position that the union should really be involved, particularly in areas in which it’s responsible for representing its members’ interests. We have a deputy secretary of labor that I think has done a great job of making sure that union members are getting the services they should from a collective bargaining standpoint.

CN: You mentioned there are new leaders emerging. Who are those leaders?

RH: Jenny Woodford, who was a former director of corrections, is now the undersecretary; Joe McGrath, the chief deputy secretary of adult operations; Bernie Warner, who is now the chief deputy secretary of juvenile operations. We have some more appointments that are still coming.

The reorganization empowers all of the assistant secretaries – labor, or legislative, or legal – to really exert themselves and their area of expertise in a way that they didn’t before. It used to be they were assigned tasks that fell within all of the parts of the organization instead of having leadership responsibility for their own specific part of the organization.

My general counsel is now responsible for legal, and he’s supposed to provide legal services to other parts of the organization as if he were a law firm and they were getting legal services from a law firm. He has to provide quality services to them through service-level agreements, and both parties get to measure each other on that relationship. That’s a huge change from what we did before, and the change has empowered a lot of very passionate and capable people.

CN: You have already mentioned some components of the reorganization. What do you think are the most beneficial components for the citizens of California, staff and inmates?

RH: I think that the reorganization, by consolidating the secretary’s authority and establishing separate organizations in the areas of policy, research, programs and communities, allows us to better focus on our mission of improving public safety. The bottom line is we have to improve public safety because we can’t continue to have a spiraling cycle of victimization and criminality.

Whether we’re looking at incarceration or community supervision, we have an inmate and parolee population that’s ours to work with for a certain amount of time. We have a responsibility to improve how we deal with them as well as hold them to a higher level of accountability. That’s what the reorganization does: It sets the tone and a strategic direction that put programs in place that will intervene in criminal behavior. We now have an organization in place that will provide the utmost supervision for those people, and we’ll re-incarcerate them if that’s what it requires for our communities to be safe.

CN: In previous comments you have made references to taking an ‘evidence-based’ approach to corrections. Can you explain what that is and how things were different before the reorganization?

RH: The ‘evidence’ I’m referring to is a body of research into best practices that shows there are interventions we can put in place that can achieve a reduction in recidivism. By us saying, ‘let’s look at what the science says,’ it prevents conversations that sensationalize or politicize the issue of recidivism from gaining as much weight. You can make certain calls and claims about the problem, but if the evidence doesn’t support them, and they’re not going to lead to a reduction in recidivism, we’re going to point that out.

The other thing is that when we say we want evidence, we want evidence that lets us do the things that make our prisons safer. There are things that can be done internally that might not achieve reduced recidivism, but they are going to create a safer environment for our staff to work in and a safer environment for our inmates to live in while they’re there.

We have a three-fold goal: community safety; reductions in recidivism; and institutional safety. In our case, we haven’t been as connected from a national standpoint as some of the other states have been with regard to tracking best practices. Now, by looking at evidence from what other states have already done, we can overlay California’s demographics, fiscal policies and political realities against other states and see where we stand and what might work.

CN: Now to look at another subject: For the first time in nearly 20 years there are no new state prisons being built and no plans are on the way. Do you think the break in construction will last long or do you foresee new developments?

RH: We haven’t got any plans for new facilities, but I think we would be remiss if we didn’t look at the population projections for the state and see what that means for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. I think we also have to look at what we’re doing with juveniles to determine whether or not we have the right types of facilities for them. Now we’re doing an evaluation in both the adult and juvenile sectors to determine whether or not we have the right prisoners in the right prisons.

I think also, even though we don’t have anything on the drawing board, I’d be remiss in not having some vision about what we’re going to do to replace some of our aging facilities. To answer your question, no we don’t have anything on the drawing board. The question is whether or not we need to plan for some things in the future. I think we do.

CN: You mentioned addressing the replacement aging facilities. Some people have questioned whether it necessary to build a new $200 million dollar death row at San Quentin Prison (built in 1852). Do you think it is necessary to build there?

RH: My response to that has always been I need 7,000 beds. For 7,000 beds I need $200 million to put the most dangerous criminals in California behind good, closed, locked doors. If someone else in the other arenas of California can find a better place to put it and will give me $200 million and build it there, I have no problem with putting it somewhere else.

But right now I have something on the drawing board. I’m getting three condemned prisoners per month into San Quentin, the oldest prison in California. I have the responsibility to go forward and take what we’ve got and try to build upon it. If people believe that they can do it in a different place, I’m not wedded to it being at San Quentin. But I think that I have to be wedded to what I have on the drawing board now to do something as fast as I can for that population that is the most dangerous in California. I’m flexible, quite frankly, but I’m not going to back off San Quentin. I’m going to hold on to what I have right now because we have a growing problem.

CN: With the reorganization it appears that the wall between adult corrections and juvenile corrections has grown thinner. How is that going to affect youth prisoners in the state?

RH: I think it’s going to improve upon the youth operations considerably. The California Youth Authority always was in the Youth Adult Corrections Agency. The reorganization did not bring them from somewhere else and bring them into the YACA. What the reorganization did was allow the secretary to make decision based upon what the science says needs to be done for juveniles.

That is different than what the science says needs to be done for adults. But if you can achieve efficiencies, it doesn’t make any sense for me to do duplications. If there is expertise that rests in other parts of the organizations that can make our places safer and our staff more successful, we need to consolidate those things.

People have said, “Is the wall thinner?” If you look historically at the investment that California made on adult in comparison California made on the juvenile, you’ll see that there was a lack of investment historically. The fiscal plans are under-funded. If you look at juvenile and think there is a problem with the future of what we’re doing, I say that there is a problem with the past.