Stephen Amos became Chief of the Jails Division for the National Institute of Corrections in November 2015.  What follows are excerpts from an interview conducted by the NIC Information Center.

Question: When you came aboard, was the prolonged absence of a Jails Division Chief felt?

Chief Amos: Absolutely, the Chief’s position had been vacant since February 2014 and the Jails Division’s staff reported to BeLinda Watson, the Chief of the Prisons Division during this period. Ms. Watson did an admirable job at simultaneously managing both the jails and the prisons divisions. At one point in time during this same time frame there were but three Correctional Program Specialists, Panda Adkins, Dee Halley and Michael Jackson who’s commendable efforts to support the field were outstanding.  However, despite their commendable efforts they were further challenged in FY14 by sequestration and furlough, to be followed in FY15 with a continuing resolution which denied budgetary authority to travel or make expenditures in support of the field.  Consequently, there were significant challenges faced by the Jails Divisions staff to simply ensure the timely continuity of responsive NIC services to the field. Furthermore, these staffing and budgetary barriers limited the Jails Division’s ability to fully assess the emerging issues of the nation’s jails and develop new and expanded responsive trainings specific to jails.  

Simply stated jails are not prisons and they are uniquely different in their purpose, populations served and their jurisdictional authority.  There are an estimated 3,046 jails in the United States comprised of city, county, regional, private, tribal and federal detention centers.  These jails generally house shorter-term offenders and are an extension of the local community.  Jail prisoners all too often cycle through the jails, serving from a few hours to several years, with a significant percentage (20-40%) being un-sentenced individuals awaiting court dates. Consequently, jails are uniquely different then prisons in that they serve as the first stop in the criminal justice system, whereas prisons are too often the last stop.  With these unique characteristics, jails face unique challenges and opportunities to enhance public safety, by holding offenders accountable, providing meaningful programs and services, and doing so in a cost effective manner.

Question: Describe the steps you are taking to assess existing training and technical assistance offerings and your strategic planning efforts and the implications for FY17.   

Over the course of my six month tenure, the Jails Division has committed to meeting with and conferring with the small, medium, rural, regional and large jail administrators and sheriffs throughout the country to hear directly from practitioners as to the challenges they face in managing these very dynamic environments.  Additionally, as a team we have met with the vast majority of the interrelated professional associations and some local justice system stakeholders to secure their knowledgeable perspective. These conferral efforts were critical to ensuring that the Jail’s Divisions FY17 offerings to the field are responsive and tailored to the needs of all stakeholders. Earlier this month, we presented our findings and strategy for FY17 implementation to the National Institute of Corrections Advisory Board and further secured their thoughtful insights.  

These extensive conferral efforts were instrumental in the recognition of significant gaps in the current Jails Division training and technical assistance offerings and further assisted us in the identification of topical areas to either expand or reprioritize our offerings in FY17.  For example, while each jurisdictional practitioner and association had a different perspective as to the prioritization of need, what became universally clear was that the biggest challenge that has emerged in the past three years is the influx of people that jails historically have not been well suited to deal with—the mentally ill, opiate users, and a growing population of women.  Much of the jail practitioners and local justice systems stakeholder perspectives shared were consistent with the national research.  For example the research   demonstrates there is approximately 150,000 diagnosed mentally ill prisoners at any one time in our  jails and further establishes that there is four times the number of diagnosed mentally ill people in jails than there are in state mental health facilities, and that jails have become de facto mental health facilities.

So as to respond to these population changes the relationship of what a jail is and how the staff interact with these prisoners has also changed.  Increasingly, progressive jail administrators and sheriffs are looking to develop and expand diversion programs, establish partnerships with specialty courts, and are seeking enhanced collaborations in pursuit of mental health, substance abuse treatment, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and other essential services in support of their mission. These are resource heavy issues for jails that were less of a concern in previous years than they are today. We as the NIC Jail’s Division are committed to embracing these challenges and opportunities and tailoring responsive offerings to meet the needs of the field.

Chief Amos:  To ensure the Jails Divisions ongoing engagement with the field and its timely identification of emerging issues, each of the staff members of the Jails Division serve as committee members and or liaisons with all of the major professional associations. This not only enhances their professional development but ensures they are always in touch with the emerging issues in our field but also familiar with the challenges and can seize on opportunities to engage the field. These professional associations have welcomed our enhanced participation and are appreciative of our commitment to the needs of the field and the enhanced our coordination and collaboration.  

Further steps taken in pursuit of our enhanced strategic engagement, was on May 16, 2016, the NIC Jails Division hosted the inaugural quarterly Corrections Executive Coordination Meeting in Washington, DC.  The participants included executive directors of correctional associations, research and policy stakeholders, jail practitioners and senior executives from ONDCP, BJA, NIJ, BJS, and BOP. These efforts were designed to enhance communication and profile key correctional initiatives such as the Stepping Up Initiative and discuss opportunities to enhanced collaboration and promote new partnerships. 

Chief Amos on traditional and eLearning resources:  Recently we conducted a study of our Learning Management System (LMS) for FY14 and FY15, to examine the past utilization of 15 core classroom trainings and identify the participants served. The results identified 782 participants during this period that benefitted from these in person training.  In reviewing the curricula of these core trainings it was determined that they remain topically relevant to the field and are still in demand.  When giving overall consideration to the absence of staff and leadership during this same period, coupled with the sequestration, furlough, and continued resolution this is a significant accomplishment to be recognized.  The conferral process has provided us with identifiable opportunities to scale our offerings and build a robust portfolio for FY17. 

In contrast NIC Jails Division enrollment in e-learning courses for FY13-15 was 83,771. While it’s a great thing that we are making significant headway with regards to impact, the question remained which e-learning courses generated the most enrollments and what if any trends or emerging opportunities could be identified to enhance this offering. Further examination determined that we the Jails Division have been most successful in our e-learning outreach when we target topical offerings of immediate urgency to the field such as PREA related trainings. Consequently, we envision for FY17 an expansion of PREA offerings to include staffing recommendations and a new focus on the use of restrictive housing coupled with an aggressive promotional campaign.

Chief Amos on Jails Division outreach:  A significant number of the jails in this country are struggling to ensure constitutional compliance.  We have to build our delivery strategy around where the challenges are most significant, and where our limited resources will have the most impact. Through  the conferral process we have determined that we have to change our delivery systems.  If we do more of the same, we will have the same limited outcomes, and those outcomes are not going to ensure that NIC has the level of relevance or impact that it should have. So, there are big challenges out there, and how do we address them?

We gathered information to determine what are we doing and its impact. For illustration we are currently providing Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training—and that is unquestionably a critical need in the field—but under our current delivery model we can only do so for 30 people at a time, five times per year. We will have trained 150 people out of 169,000 correctional professionals in CIT. Consequently, we have missed a significant opportunity to impact the field. So it’s not that what we do is bad, it’s that we have to change the delivery model to enhance our impact.  So, we have revamped our delivery model for FY17 by increasing and improving our e-learning offerings as previously stated, maximizing our outreach to state and local association gatherings, and the development of 12 Centers of Excellence pilot sites to facilitate training for trainers on a regional level.

More specifically, to expand our outreach and advance our impact, we are going to directly support state associations—criminal justice, corrections, and jail—organizations that have their own practitioner meetings, partially because they already pay their own way there. These groups are excited by our outreach because we give them a regionally responsive corrections track, bringing relevant training and topical speakers as requested at no expense to the organization or its membership. What does that mean for us? We can expand our services to those practitioners and stakeholders that can attend a local association meeting, but cannot travel at their own expense to large conferences or afford to hire consultants and speakers. We are currently, conducting and sponsoring state and local trainings and will expand these offerings—basically going back and working in the field and presenting our technical assistance and trainings to the stakeholders at the regional level through an expanded technical resource provider. It’s much easier and more cost effective for my team to travel, as we recently did, and support locally hosted training of practitioners, than bring all of them to us in groups of 25. So, we are actively outreaching to these state and local associations in order to get a clear understanding about what their training needs are and how we can support them.  This approach provides for a more responsive delivery system to meeting the local and regional need of customers and allocates limited resources efficiently in a way that can be scalable.

Chief Amos on training resources and introducing the Centers of Excellence:  NIC is committed and charged with creating long-term sustainable capacity building in the field of corrections and recognizes that the average 300 bed facility in the United States is significantly limited in its ability to create and sustain a training capacity.  Concurrently, the NIC firmly supports the work of the Large Jail Network, who’s membership consists of the highly qualified executive leaders of the approximately 70 jails across the country with a I,000-plus beds. While these officials generally have more resources and a stronger collective voice, and can go to the large conferences and leverage their influence to get needed resources, they recognize the challenges faced by their colleagues at the small, medium and rural jails who do not have the same level of resources and frequently struggle to secure necessary training and technical resources.  

In partnership with selected hosting agencies of the Large Jail Network, in FY17 we will pilot 12 Centers of Excellence sites , as technical assistance (TA) and training hubs to provide regional training resources to these smaller and rural jails. These 12 sites will host trainings and support technical assistance offerings co-sponsored by NIC  to surrounding jurisdictions at no charge. These selected pilot sites are to be commended for their selfless commitment to supporting their less fortunate counterparts and will be recognized for their respective expertise. NIC will provide any requested training of their staff, follow up with T4T, and provide experts and mentoring to support this capacity building effort.  These efforts recognize that regions are very unique—what you do in Texas you don’t do in Ohio—and  these pilot sites must be responsive to regionally specific legal and policy requirements.  Again, what we have learned through the conferral process is that the only way to do what needs to be done is to develop expanded partnerships, so as to be a force multiplier.  These Centers of Excellence will augment the existing infrastructure and resources that we have at the NIC Academy.  

In presenting the Centers of Excellence initiative to several Federal agencies they too are interested in sponsoring some of these Centers of Excellence sites to further profile best practices and promote demonstration projects.  Such an example is the Stepping Up Initiative and the many supporting agencies and organizations. These organizations have come to see the same thing; you can put on a national conference and promote evidence based practices, but at the end of the day, somebody has to get boots on the ground to train staff and build sustainable capacity. That’s what NIC’s specialty is, that’s what we’re good at, and that’s why we have to move back to direct engagement at the regional level.

Chief Amos on expanded use of technical resource professionals and utilization of cooperative agreements:  We intend beginning this summer to distribute to the field a significant number of solicitations for cooperative agreements in FY17 to greatly expand our capacity to support new efforts previously articulated. These cooperative agreements will reduce the volume of individual contracts and bundle like services and providers to enhance timely responses to the needs of the field, enhanced recruitment, selection criteria, training, and evaluation requirements for technical resource providers.

Question: What made you want to come to NIC?

Chief Amos: I have worked in the fields of law enforcement and corrections for the past 32 years as a practitioner, researcher and policy maker at the local, state, national, and international levels and I have never found anything that is more professionally rewarding.  As many of my colleagues at this stage of my career, I have worked in the field long enough to see the many positive changes that we have collective brought about as a result of our commitment to this profession and it is truly remarkable.

Earlier in my career, I worked for the Department of Justice between 1994-2000 following the passage of the Omnibus Crime Act, and I served as the Deputy Director of the Corrections Programs Office, Office of Justice Programs which oversaw the Violent Offender Incarceration-Truth in Sentencing (VOI-TIS); Residential Substance Abuse Treatment (RSAT); Tribal Detention; and Boot Camp grants. During that period, I had a significant amount of engagement with NIC, and consequently I’m very familiar with its 40 plus year legacy.  My interest over the years remained in how to further utilize the DOJ platform to promote sustainable correctional capacity building efforts. The Corrections Programs Office in partnership with NIC had a massive sustainable impact on the field, and it wasn’t the billions we spent on more infrastructures, but it was the direct technical assistance and training that we funded in support of the practitioner that has moved us forward as a profession.

There are many opportunities at NIC to make a difference and my decision was made when I heard Director Cosby express his vision for NIC and the Jails Division.  I am a mission driven individual and I needed to hear that the NIC mission was still forward thinking and deliberate.  I wanted to hear that NIC had those expectations of this Division and the leader for it. So my interest in coming to NIC was this would be the most rewarding capstone to my career… doing what I love most, supporting the professionals working tirelessly to enhance the public safety of their communities and the lives of those for whom they are charged with stewarding.

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