This article is about the role of the corrections commissioner. It is based on a detailed, first-hand examination of the tenures of some two dozen commissioners and a close familiarity with about two dozen more. All told, this sample of commissioners represents experience at every level of government, in every region of the country, over the last six decades. A few of the commissioners (or directors) in the sample are famous (at least in corrections circles) and enjoyed exceptionally long tenures. Others are less well known and had much briefer terms. Several of them directed more than one agency, many worked at more than one level of government, and a dozen or so started out as uniformed corrections officers. After leaving their posts, a few went on to head corrections associations and research foundations, many became consultants and part-time professors, and at least one became active in private sector corrections. Finally, some have long since passed from the scene; others are just beginning their careers.
It is tempting to discuss the role of the corrections commissioner by focusing biographically on the often colorful personalities, professional histories, and leadership styles of those who have held the job, endeavoring to trace, on the one hand, the exceedingly complex interplay of their correctional philosophies and management practices and, on the other, the objective performance of their agencies (e.g., rates of prison violence, levels of inmate programming, cost-effectiveness, recidivism rates).Such an approach would produce much that is worth knowing about the dynamics of correctional leadership, but it would reveal little that is general, meaningful, and true about the role of the corrections commissioner itself.
Understood theoretically, the role of the corrections commissioner differs little from that of any other executive, public or private. There is, for example, absolutely nothing about the functions of the corrections executive that make them un-amenable to analysis in the terms laid down by the celebrated organization theorist Chester I. Barnard. In 1938 Barnard offered a seminal definition of formal organization as "a system of consciously coordinated activity or forces of two or more persons." The difficulty of any executive management task varies directly with the complexity of the relationships among and between organizational inputs (such as people, money, or tools) and organizational outputs (such as public health or criminal victimization). Written in Barnardian shorthand, the role of the corrections commissioner is to consciously coordinate the management of often incorrigible adjudicated criminals subject to stated legal goals and public expectations that are multiple, vague, and contradictory, and in the absence of both proven technologies and adequate bureaucratic authority. It is an impossible job in which one neither clearly succeeds nor fails but more nearly (as one commissioner phrased it) "strategizes, copes, hangs on for a awhile, and then lets go."
That the executive management of a barbed-wire bureaucracy is an impossible job may be glimpsed from the fact that the average contemporary corrections commissioner "lets go" or gets fired within about three years of assuming his or her post. Between 1973 and 1987, fewer than one-third of all adult corrections agencies were headed by commissioners whose average tenure was five years or more; in more than one-third they held office for an average of three years or less.
Of course, tenures vary somewhat according to such factors as the commissioner's professional background and who made the appointment. The commissioner may come from within or outside of the agency, may have plenty of previous experience in corrections or none at all, and may be formally appointed by the governor or a corrections policy board. It does not matter. A commissioner is beating the odds if he or she "hangs on" long enough to settle into office, break in the executive team, establish alliances with relevant outside actors (legislators, judges, activists, union leaders, community representatives, and so on), and orchestrate any significant changes. It is rare for anyone to be able to make changes either in corrections policies themselves or in how the policies inherited from predecessors are translated into administrative action in the cellblocks and on the streets.
Historically, and at each level of government, administrative instability at the top of a barbed-wire bureaucracy has been associated with corrections institutions and programs that are in disfavor and lack political support. Almost without exception, where directors have played musical chairs, corrections bureaucracies have been especially troubled. Yet some commissioners have mastered their impossible jobs. Even more remarkable is the fact that-regardless of place, time, ideological bent, and other fundamental differences-they have done so by employing strikingly similar coping strategies. Most commissioners, however, have been overwhelmed by their impossible jobs. They have worn the role of corrections commissioner like a straitjacket and appear to have drawn their coping strategies from the same poisoned well. But before examining how corrections commissioners have coped, we need to learn the basic elements of their impossible job.
At least since the Jacksonian era, most Americans have wanted a criminal justice system that, among other things, apprehends and visits harm upon the guilty; makes offenders more virtuous and law-abiding; protects the innocent from victimization; dissuades would-be offenders from criminal pursuits; invites most convicts to return to the bosom of the free community; and achieves these ends without violating the public conscience or emptying the public purse. For most of the last two centuries, Americans have wished to ride simultaneously upon the four horsemen of criminal corrections: retribution (or punishment); reformation (or rehabilitation); deterrence (individual and general); and public protection (or incapacitation). In addition, within the lesser constellation of penal goals, they have demanded jobs for prisoners without threats to free workers; more adequate inmate programs and living space without more taxes or sites for construction; stern treatment of offenders without damage to prisoners' rights; and so on.
The penitentiary was an American invention, created as a way of optimizing the disparate moral and practical aims of American criminal justice. In the preface to his translation of the 1833 study of American penal practices by Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, Francis Lieber wrote, "I thought always to be borne in mind, that a convict is neither a brute nor a saint, and to treat him as either, is equally injurious to himself and to society." Lieber, however, was preaching to the already converted. In the United States, the Judeo-Christian ethic of justice tempered by mercy was well established; the bars of the penitentiary were forged by revenge and cooled by forgiveness. Religious idealism mixed with cultural pragmatism to create a public expectation that in this country if nowhere else, the criminally wayward could and should be reformed as well as punished.
The report by Beaumont and Tocqueville did much to heighten this expectation. For the apparent successes of the American penal system they credited the nation's prison superintendents-the administrative forerunners of the corrections commissioner. Though formally answerable to officials called inspectors, "the superintendent, whose written authority is not very great, is yet the soul of the administration." The Frenchmen continued: The most important place then in the prison, is without a doubt, that of the superintendent. Generally it is entrusted in the penitentiaries of the United States, to honorable men, entitled by their talents to functions of this nature. ... To great probity and a deep sense of their duty they add much experience, and that perfect knowledge of men so necessary to their position.
Beaumont and Tocqueville noticed that the superintendents welcomed the inspection and scrutiny of legislators and others. "This general attention," they concluded, "a source of perpetual vigilance, produces within the officers of the prisons, an extraordinary zeal and extreme circumspection. . . . This surveillance of public opinion which constrains them in some respects, produces also its compensation, because it is this public opinion which elevates their functions, and makes them honorable, low and obscure as they formerly were."
For most of the next century, prison superintendents continued to hold the central place noted by Beaumont and Tocqueville. Few, however, were the paragons of professional probity and openness to outsiders that so impressed the two Frenchmen. In the 1840s states began to turn convicts over to private contractors, a process that was accelerated after the Civil War. The inmate abuse and political corruption bred by the contract-lease system reached epic proportions. Yet penal systems that remained in public hands were rarely better and often worse. For example, before the Federal Bureau of Prisons was established, there were seven federal prisons holding some twelve thousand inmates. Each prison was funded separately by Congress and run according to the whims of individual experiment-a few on their own enthusiastic initiative, many in deference to political and judicial pressures, and at least one (as he reported) "just for the hell of it." They coordinated the design and implementation of a wide variety of rehabilitation programs ranging from daily inmate "rap sessions" and special education, to experiments in behavior modification, to work-release projects and various types of prisoner self-government. By the mid-1970s both intra- and extra-departmental researchers were discovering and broadcasting what most of the commissioners had expected; namely, that while the relationship between inmate participation in such programs and recidivism rates was ambiguous, negative, or nonexistent, the relaxed controls had led to serious institutional disorders. Meanwhile, former champions of the programs complained that in the name of rehabilitation inmates were being coerced into treatment regimens, widening the already vast discretionary authority of corrections officials and leading to longer stretches for prisoners tagged "un-rehabilitated."
