Saturday, June 23, 2012

Jerry Sandusky, High Proflie Child Molester

Monster goes to Prison, Jerry Sandusky Convicted Guilty

Monday, June 18, 2012

Emerging Crisis coming up in Arizona Prisons

Organizing for an emerging crisis inside Arizona prisons


Arizona prisons are becoming more complicated and more difficult to operate because of mismanagement styles creating numerous structural flaws, human resource barriers for growth and staff development, internal cultural biases, flawed personnel processes and broken down communication lines that has stretched the agency to a near breaking point in the near future.

Critics have been assailing the agency with publicized management flaws that will eventually strain the current administration and cause a unique conflict between truth and myths as well as friends and foe within the organization as tension builds and operations structures continue to fail those in leadership positions and who serve at will for the state’s governor.

This article is written to help guide the agency back to a logical and rational position of visionary thinking and strategic planning that is lacking today. For evidence, look at today’s dismal level of performance, excessive lawsuits and negative media exposure revealing the fundamental systematic failures occurring around the clock illustrating the difficulties of managing a sinking ship.

These cumulative degrees of complexity consists of overcrowding, heavy influx of mentally ill persons, delayed and extensive medical care burdens that includes an aging prison population with increased disabilities, an increase in gang violence and young violent offenders, a reduction in inmate jobs and dwindling budgets for physical plant upkeep of dilapidated buildings in dire need of remodeling, construction and waste water expansion plans.

Few believe the Arizona Department of Corrections is prepared to handle such a crisis and no emergency legislative plans have been implemented to ask for more funding to maintain a staffing level and operational standard designed to keep the public safe from incarcerated offenders throughout the state.

Today, no one inside the agency does not believe in the need for changing the scale of operation and redesigning their scope of business orders in order to address these challenging issues as well as costs, adequately trained people and risks associated with the mixture of control and support for operating the prisons sound and according to established national correctional standards statewide.

However, since no one is working on a blueprint to preserve the agency’s effectiveness and operational level, there must be an influx of new or fresh ideas coming into the organization soon in order to find and retain productive and sound structures within as the populations become more diverse and more complex to handle on a daily basis.

This hesitation to address upcoming issues has delayed the deployment of skilled and knowledgeable people within the organization into those areas needing critical support for sustained performance expectations and management accountability.

The administration needs to rethink their boundaries and centralize activities that are similar to other systems nationwide. Shifting resources to handle upcoming problems will eliminate crisis intervention and allow sound growth of better practices through pre-planning and anticipating agency needs.

These new boundaries should include: adult prison and physical plant operations, medical and mental healthcare, contractual oversight with focus on creating teams that will work on content and delivery of the appropriate resources required to handle these challenges that lay ahead. Much emphasis should be the inclusion of local managers to allow climatic and cultural influences to be included in the resolution or problem-solving techniques. Multiple teams should be formed with permission to adapt any geographical needs identified through a legitimate assessment process.

A team should be designed to handle those services, and tasks of every different prison complex throughout the state and assign a team leader to handle each functional areas: operations, supply, legal, communications, human resource management, prison bed population management,  and allow these team members to identify and create a list of tasks to consolidate and refine current operations to support these new challenges coming up within a short period of time as the clock keeps ticking away at the inevitable crisis. In addition, these team leaders should focus on redundant or potentially redundant duplication of elements that can save money in the long run through efficient management of our fiscal resources.

These team leader assessments should create a new model that has evolved around anticipated needs and problems. Instead of having people in Central Office work on this task, you should take the work where the team leader is located and work from that location with the eventual integration of all team leaders coming together with their plans and models to resolve the crisis ahead. From these assessments there should be a globally integrated model that would evolve into a new structural way of thinking inside the agency.

Such a concept would re-design the current culture and formulate a new cultural transformation that accurately reflects on real needs and real resolutions with ownership to the change and a new way employees can adapt to the ways of working out a crisis as a team rather than a few individuals.

Team leaders should be provided with new ideas how to perform these assessments and parameters should:

  1. Don’t standardize more than is necessary. Allow geographical adaptations to occur to fit the needs of each complex. Identify areas problematic e.g. inmate risk assessment tools and job classification matrixes that include positions, wages, educational or vocational impacts etc.
  2. Fit the technology to the process, not vice versa – consider technology upgrades to meet the future needs of the agency in full circle fashion.
  3. Prefer standard principles to detailed rules, customs and practices already sanctioned and endorsed by national accreditation institutions.
  4. Listen to all the voices from all areas concerned – allow better team contributions, communication and processes to develop trust and confidence of those processes identified and recommended.
  5. Implement new processes from the top with adequate consultation prior to the change. Allow change to occur if it benefits the new process identified.

Central office should consider downsizing and develop new strategies shed traditional roles and provide local controls to those prison complexes throughout the state.

This leaves the upper echelon to focus on organizational values, strategy development, and managing the business in line with established values, expectations and performance standards.


Channel 5 news interview on prison jobs for dangerous inmates