by Gary Raney and Jeffrey A. Schwartz

Reprinted from AMERICANJails   January | February 2008

The title of this article could have included the term "silver lining," because this is about very positive consequences resulting from a very negative incident. In June 2005, the most dangerousinmate in the Ada County Jail escaped. While the inmate did not kill anyone in the community and was recaptured within 10 days, the escape could not have occurred were it not for a cascading series of basic security errors by jail staff, with many of the errors traceable to staff complacency and lack of accountability. The statewide, high profile news coverage would have been much worse for the Ada County Sheriff's Office (ACSO), except that the sheriff quickly appeared on TV and took full responsibility for the escape and acknowledged that human errors on the part of his staff were primarily responsible for the escape. The immediacy and candor of the sheriff's press conference appeared to avert a media blood bath. This, then, is also a story about leadership.

Complacency and Escape
    Memorable history in Ada County easily reaches back 25 years in the operation of the jail. During that time considerable attention was given to the retention of career jail staff. Jail deputy wages were always kept equal with patrol deputy wages. A bifurcated promotional system was put in place for a few years to offer jail staff better probability for promotion. The jail's compressed work schedule was one of the most attractive in the agency for many years. While there were times of overcrowding, the inmate population was rarely more than 10 to 20 percent over design capacity before new space was added. Things were good. After all, this was Boise, Idaho. The area consistently ranks at the top of most family and business magazines as one of the best places in the United States to live and work. There are almost no serious crime problems and the amenable culture of the region is also reflected in the jail where direct-supervision dormitories are reasonably holding up to 92 inmates. A ratio of one deputy to 92 inmates is generally unheard of, but the minimal level of gang problems, racial tension, and other precipitators of jail violence made it manageable. There was a rare suicide or escape, but generally the escapes were the sort of event where the sheriff could honestly point out a facility deficiency, explain that it had been corrected, and once the inmate was recaptured all was forgotten.
    Complacency is the cancer of many organizations, and is particularly damaging to organizations like jails, which rely upon routine. A jail operates well if there is a good routine. Inmates wake up on time, they eat on time, they receive medication on time, they get recreation on time, they clean on time, and so on. Almost everything about a jail operates on a schedule and on an organizational timeline that provides for the most efficient staffing. But routine breeds monotony, and monotony breeds complacency. That is the story of the Ada County Jail.
    In early 2005, the Ada County Jail was operating above design capacity and very close to what was referred to as "operational capacity," with between 900 and 1,000 inmates. In reality, many of the jail's housing areas were overcrowded. The jail averages approximately 22,000 bookings per year with about three quarters of those bookings male and one-quarter female. Jail staffing patterns have been historically quite thin and included 151 commissioned (sworn) positions and just over 40 noncommissioned staff, including medical, administrative, and support staff, among others. The jail had a small residential work release program and a rather typical mix of inmates held under contract for the US. Marshall's Office, female inmates housed under contract for the Idaho State Department of Corrections, a few juveniles, etc.
    In the spring of 2005, an inmate in the Ada County Jail was in custody for a series of crimes, including: a shootout with police, a separate spectacular chase where he aimed his car at police and was again shot at several times, and for a smattering of collateral violations. The inmate was a chronic methamphetamine user and had outrageous behavior while "cranking" in the community, but was an intelligent and cunning inmate once he detoxified. He was one of many that leave us wondering just how successful he could have been if he had put his intelligence and effort to a positive purpose rather than crime.
    On June 18, 2005, at about noon, this inmate—the one the sheriff labeled as the most dangerous inmate in the Ada County Jail—escaped. Three things came together in what would later be described as "an alignment of the stars," circumstances that made it possible for the inmate to escape. If any of the three systems had worked properly, there would not have been an escape. Two were human error and one was the failure of a security gate lock. Over the next ten days the escapee would commit a number of felonies across the western states, but was eventually recaptured without anyone being killed or seriously injured.
    At the time of the escape, Gary Raney had been sheriff for just six months. Prior to that he had been the undersheriff. As for his response to the escape, it would have been relatively easy to put the blame on two deputies, terminate them, fix a gate lock, and move on. But within the organization the cancer of complacency had been diagnosed and a band-aid would not suffice. Surgery was needed. Before long it became clear that supervision was generally passive and had not kept pace with the rapid growth of the jail for the prior ten years. Training was present, but often focused on mandatory certifications. There was little attention given to emergency preparedness or other low-frequency situations. The importance of policy had slowly eroded through a long process of well intentioned, but dangerous, "we can get the job done" decisions like getting by with less than minimum staffing. In general, the jail was unprepared for anything out of the ordinary.
    The escape was one of the worst things that ever happened in the sheriff's office. And it was the best thing. It would be the catalyst for change to reinvent the way the jail was managed. One of the mantras the sheriff developed in response to the escape was, "The escape no longer matters. It's now history. What matters now is how we react to it." And so the change started.

The Change
    The agency began to not only dissect the timeline and events of the day, but also the policy, training, supervision, and management issues that all contributed to the sleepiness of security. The escape was no one person's fault. It was, in fact, that perfect alignment of the stars. Every level of the organization owned a piece of that alignment; from the top down, each level accepted a proportion of responsibility. Discipline was meted out with terminations, suspensions, demotions, reprimands, and counseling. There were also several key transfers of supervisors and managers; but then the agency took a deep breath and moved forward.
    First, the jail needed a fresh set of eyes. The new sheriff had been using the word "measures" over and over. Captain Ron Freeman was then selected as the new jail administrator because of his understanding of the need for data and also the need to gain the consensus from jail staff about what was important.
    The sheriff decided to ask the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) for a comprehensive operational review of the jail, with a specific emphasis on security issues and emergency procedures. Jeffrey A. Schwartz was chosen to provide this technical assistance work under the aegis of the Jails Division of NIC. He spent most of two weeks on site and examined almost every aspect of jail operations. The lengthy technical assistance report was candid and in places highly critical of some jail procedures and functions. The sheriff, the jail administrator, and the rest of the jail management team adopted the report as something of a blueprint for change. They also went well beyond that and decided to make the jail the focus of change within the sheriff's office. They set a lofty goal that the jail would be the best in the Northwest.
    The jail was far from a disaster. As the NIC report put it, "There are many medium-sized and large jails in the country that have longstanding and pervasive problems with gangs, frequent incidents of serious violence, bad staff-inmate relationships, poor staff professionalism, serious sanitation and maintenance problems, woefully inadequate health services, and terrible morale. None of these characteristics apply to the Ada County Jail." It is axiomatic that any transformation of an organization must include, if not start with, a consideration of its culture. Here, the overall culture of the sheriff's office was healthy and positive, but the subculture in the jail was noticeably less so. That had to be addressed, but it was extremely advantageous to be able to build on the strengths of the larger organization.
    The first step in the operational turnaround for the jail was to deal with some of the "low hanging fruit" identified in the technical assistance report. There were security problems that were comparatively quick, cheap, and easy to fix. As an example, the contract female state inmates were housed in a low security building that was an accident waiting to happen. While that contract produced a substantial amount of revenue, analysis suggested that the program actually cost the county more than the revenue earned. The contract was terminated and the building reallocated to allow a larger work release program.
    Following a number of immediate changes, Captain Freeman led the jail staff through a priority and planning process that all started with identifying what mattered. The following key issues were contemplated, discussed, agreed upon, and became key factors in the change:

Clear the Path—The first thing the ACSO had to do was to clean up the issues that were seemingly minor, but caused obstacles for supervisors. To accomplish this, the management team began bringing all supervisors together every two weeks and created the expectation that supervisors would bring the problems that mattered in their world to the table. For too long, the meetings had been used for the management level to discuss their problems, but now they became the opportunity for management to listen to supervisors' problems. Of course, as much as talking about the issues, the frequent meetings brought the ten or so supervisors together personally so they began to communicate better. Over time, the ACSO saw fewer issues being sent up the ladder and more issues being addressed horizontally in the jail.

Establish What Matters—Only somewhat coincidental in timing was the sheriff's effort to clearly establish what really matters within the major functions of the agency. Through a homegrown process, the jail ultimately established "pillars" of what was important. For the jail, those became:

1. Safety of staff—The goal, of course, is self-evident, but the hidden value of the statement was that every employee in the jail, including medical staff, kitchen staff and even warehouse staff, began to realize they had an important role in making sure all of the other employees were kept safe from weapons, possible assaults and other potential threats.
2. Security of the facility—In short, no escapes. Remember that a precipitating event for the change was an escape, so again every employee in the jail came to understand that they had a role in facility security and making sure no inmate escapes. The valuable lesson learned by everyone in the ACSO is that escapes occur because people start to become complacent.
3. Well-Being of Inmates—The last, but also very important pillar of the jail, was that everything is better when an inmate is well. Tension causes frustration and frustration causes violence. The ACSO is probably middle-of-the-road when it comes to being "hard" or "soft" in privileges for inmates; but the staff are all intelligent people who know that life is better for everyone if the basic needs of the inmates are met in a professional way. Although not a pillar, an important change that followed soon afterwards was that our behavior management practices became incentive-based rather than punishment-based. It's amazing what an inmate will do to earn the privilege of buying a bottle of soda.

Identify and Track Meaningful Measures—As Peter Drucker once said, "What gets measured, get's done." Measures were thoughtfully identified and tracked under an overall "Broken Windows" theory. In the 1980s George Kelling wrote an article about policing that suggested if the police take care of the small problems, they will prevent some of the big ones. That belief was thoroughly embraced in the Ada County Jail; and along with the easy measures like escape and suicide attempts, key indicators of operations could be established and tracked.
    The technical assistance report had noted that the jail collected information on a great many things, but that the information was then not analyzed in particularly useful ways. The glut of trivial or irrelevant information then tended to mask the really crucial data. The jail identified those dimensions and parameters that were important for accountability and/or for management decision making. Through a series of developments, the jail began to track just a few, but some very important measures. Reports were created that measured the percentage of time that a particular team was out of compliance with the standard 15 or 30-minute well-being checks for inmates. When all of the teams came in at about 5 to 8 percent, except for one that was at 12 percent, the sergeant quickly realized the broken window wasn't being attended to. In only a matter of weeks, all the teams came into alignment with an average of about a 6 percent noncompliance rate that the ACSO believes is reasonable. Assaults on inmates, assaults on staff, uses of force, and other measures were carefully thought through, measured, and reported on a team-by-team comparison. The logic was not just that inmate fights are bad, but that inmate fights may be an underlying signal of tension that might lead to something worse if not attended to. In the last two years there have been no suicides, no escapes, no weapons assaults, and no serious injury assaults on either staff or other inmates.

Empower Leadership, But With Expectations—Spread throughout this process was a key underlying change: leadership. While the sergeants who had been in the jail during the escape were good people, some of them had also become complacent. Those who stayed had the institutional knowledge to move into key positions that capitalized on their experience, but all of the operational supervisors were replaced within the year after the escape. As the ACSO reflects on what led to the current success, all of the management team agrees it could not have happened if it were not for fresh, energetic leadership at the first-line supervisor level. In addition to just having new sergeants, those people were mentored and encouraged to be leaders. They have had not only great fun, but have also helped their team with great learning as they led their own emergency drills-often as simple as a mock hostage situation when things were quiet.

Manage The Future—Population management was another key element in redesigning the jail. As the technical assistance report had noted, the jail had no population management capacity or function. A full-time population management position was created and the jail management team began to track population management issues closely. The jail population fell quickly and to no one's surprise, it was a very different facility to manage with 800 inmates than it had been with 1,000 to 1,100 inmates. Also, while moderate population changes affect unit overcrowding but have little structural impact, larger and more long-term reductions in population carry the possibility of consolidating housing units and moving or reducing staff. In general, reducing the total number of bed-days (with the exception of contract beds) reduces costs. Also, with living unit populations reduced and deputies held accountable to spend most of their time on the units, the jail began to look more and more like a direct supervision facility.
    Two measurement results are surprising and most instructive. First, the jail conducts monthly inmate satisfaction surveys with a large cross sample of the population. Contrary to the well-worn assumption that inmates will always complain, invent problems and the like, the inmate survey results in the Ada County Jail reflect widespread satisfaction with conditions of confinement and general appreciation of staff-inmate relationships. That formal inmate satisfaction data is validated by informal communication from inmates, in which one of the most common themes is that they have experience with other correctional facilities and believe the differences are dramatic.
    A second equally surprising metric has to do with staff. There is no question that the entire Ada County Sheriff's Office has a high degree of professionalism, employee pride, and job satisfaction. More specifically, however, the most recent employee survey found that between 91 percent and 92 percent of the deputies in the patrol division indicated that they were "very satisfied" or "extremely satisfied" with their jobs and with the organization. The comparable figure for the deputies working in the jail was 94 percent! Is there another sheriff's office in the country where job satisfaction is noticeably higher in the jail than in the patrol division? Lest the more cynical reader think those results are due to a poor surveyor statistical manipulation, they are clearly buttressed by other factors in the jail. In the last year, a number of deputies and supervisors have expressed a desire to stay in the jail for the rest of their careers and not to rotate back to patrol or detective divisions, and they are the group—the first line deputies and supervisors and mid-managers—that have achieved the turnaround. They want no part of transfers.
    This article should not be taken as implying that the Ada County Jail has reached a plateau and now may rest on its laurels. There are serious challenges that have not been resolved and much hard work lies ahead. The jail can still improve markedly 'and no one is more aware of that than the jail management and staff. For example, one of the results of the very low staffing patterns that have existed in the jail for many years is that the supervisory span of control has been so high as to be completely unrealistic. The county hasn't the money to simply hire a large group of additional supervisors and the jail continues to experiment with ways to mitigate this problem, as well as the overall level of staffing. There is no shortage of challenges, but there is also no limit on what a jail can accomplish.
    How good is the Ada County Jail? The best in the Northwest? One of the best in the country? That "beauty contest" question is intriguing, but there is no agreed-upon protocol for measuring jail quality. Such judgments are necessarily highly subjective. Anyone familiar with the Ada County Jail prior to the escape would quickly conclude there has been a "turnaround" and remarkably that it was achieved in less than two years. There is also little question that it is easier and faster to transform a good jail into an exceptional jail than to try to reform a truly terrible jail. Often, though, that is not the issue. In too many cases, the jail that seems to be operating smoothly, or well, does not have motivation to aim for the next level; or even to ask how many levels there are. In effect, the good becomes the enemy of the excellent. In Ada County, Idaho, the jail turnaround has had benefits both obvious and subtle for the staff, the inmates, and the community at large. The staff, of course, continues to strive for additional improvement.
    Finally, the nature of the jail business is nothing if not uncertain. Ada County could have a jail disturbance or a fire or some other crisis the day after this article is published. However, if that happens, it will not be because of a lack of leadership or an angry inmate population or bad staff morale, and it will not be due to staff complacency.© _______________________________________________________________________________
Ada County Sheriff Gary Raney lives in Boise, Idaho, and has been sheriff since 2005. He has served in the agency since 1983, and along with his duties as sheriff, he is an adjunct professor for two universities and consults on organizational management. He has a Master of Arts Degree from Boise State University and is a graduate of the FBI National Academy and Northwestern University's School of Police Staff and Command.

Jeffrey Schwartz is the President of LETRA, Inc., a non-profit criminal justice training, research and consultation organization in the San Francisco Bay area. Dr. Schwartz has more than 30 years experience working with law enforcement and correctional agencies across the United States and Canada. His corrections work includes jails, prisons, probation and parole with both juvenile and adult agencies. Dr. Schwartz is best known for developing comprehensive emergency preparedness systems for correctional institutions, for crisis intervention and conflict resolution training programs, and for innovative approaches to instructor training. He also does expert witness work on use of force and conditions of confinement, critical incident reviews after major emergencies and "turnaround" work with agencies wanting to change organizational culture.

AMERICANJails   JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2008 ©