The Impossible Job of the Corrections Commissioner

In 1978 the California Department of Corrections, which had led the charge for rehabilitation, was given a new and simplified legal mandate by its state legislature: Punish offenders and protect the public. Other penal systems followed suit. Neither in California nor elsewhere, however, did barbed-wire bureaucrats respond by dismantling treatment programs; indeed, in dozens of jurisdictions these programs were expanded. From the mid-1970s through the early 1980s, noted academic penologists exhorted corrections directors to replace the "rehabilitation model" with the ' 'punishment model," or what a practitioner-author described as the "justice model for corrections."19 But as one commissioner recalled, he and several of his peers were neither willing nor able to shift administrative gears; in their view, such shifts were imprudent and unnecessary.

This business about one corrections model replacing the next is not exactly false but it misses the fact that we've never been all about one thing or the other. Except maybe in a few places where you had strong public pressure on one side or the other, or visionaries in charge, we never treated convicts as fallen angels to be rehabilitated; we never treated them like trash to be stored or warehoused. . . . The commissioner of corrections who plays the avenging angel or the redeemer is cruising for big lumps.

As another commissioner explained: In corrections, you don't change the way you manage people just because some professor got a bright idea about what works and what doesn't. In the day-to-day of it, everything gets conserved-the things you do to deprive them, to help them help themselves, to make an example of them, to keep them from harming the public. No matter what anybody says, in corrections you try to do everything all the time or you are defeated quickly.



It is not too much to conclude that the core of the historic role of the corrections commissioner has been to rediscover, articulate, and administer the logic of the state-supervised deprivation of liberty as a criminal sanction. That mandate operates over and against the wishes and pressures of those who, at least in the abstract, would be satisfied with a criminal justice system that' 'only" punishes, or deters, or attempts to reform, or protects the public. A corrections commissioner who came to his post with experience as a parole-board member summarized the dilemma.

What's your job in corrections if you're the one in charge? What does the public really want from you? The polls and the budget, the academic fads don't say. But look at the job itself. What's its logic? If society wanted its pound of flesh, they could get it more simply and cheaply. You can deter crime by cutting off heads. You can incapacitate and keep him from preying on the public without the services of commissioners and parole agents and [the rest]. . . . The commissioner's true role must be as guardian of corrections, there because, despite the reactionary or radical whims of his own staff, or the legislature, or the board, or nowadays the judges . . . this society wants to keep at all four "R's"-reformation, retribution, reintegration, rehabilitation. . . .The commissioner's job is to steer towards them irrespective of the fact that nobody knows how and there are always the jokers who want to make a hard right or a hard left.

A fundamental and effective coping strategy employed by corrections commissioners (described in more detail later) has been to conceive of themselves less as the custodians of criminals and more as the custodians of an untidy bundle of public values, at least one of which is forever being sacrificed to assorted public frustrations, staff pressures, academic trends, and ideological currents. On the other hand, those commissioners who have coped by making some short-term accommodations have invariably been burned-been fired or moved to another agency, retired or adopted a new line of work, after having presided over poor correctional institutions and programs. Before considering strategy, however, it is necessary to highlight the political and bureaucratic elements of the corrections commissioner's impossible job.

Historically, the impossible job of the corrections commissioner has had relatively few occupants with either the willingness or the ability to "try, experiment, keep at it." But it has had enough Betos, Bennetts, and Carlsons to suggest that creative coping strategies do exist and can make a difference. Although it is possible to make limited generalizations about the strategies themselves, it is not yet possible to generalize about the types of men and women who are likely to make good chief executives of barbed-wire bureaucracies. As tentative propositions, however, it would appear that some or all of the following general traits are necessary:

• an understanding of the multiple and conflicting nature of the agency's goals coupled with a genuine commitment to each of them
  
  
• a creative capacity to translate broad societal expectations and policy decrees into administrative action
  
  
• an energetic approach to the internal and external obstacles to mustering the human and financial resources necessary to make innovations
  
  
• a personality forceful and complex enough to become identified with the agency itself
  

In essence, the conclusion is that the best way for corrections commissioners to cope with their impossible job is for them to recognize it as such and to grapple with it accordingly. Those managers of barbed-wire bureaucracies who have been most successful have understood intuitively what I have discussed explicitly-that their agency's goals are many and in conflict; that the means to achieve these goals may not be at hand; that their authority is fragmented; and that their clients are a hard lot, usually uncooperative and generally unrepresentative of the better lights of human nature. Needless to say, corrections commissioners may succeed or fail for reasons (and from strategies) other than those highlighted in this article. Also, it is probably true that the effectiveness of corrections commissioners is more contingent upon broad contextual variables (e.g., economic conditions; whether the period is one of administrative expansion, consolidation, or contraction; the character of surrounding political structures) than the foregoing analysis suggests-anchored as it is in the skill and inventiveness (or lack thereof) of the jobs' incumbents. Still, it is fair to conclude that if our barbed-wire bureaucracies have failed more often than they have succeeded; it is largely because their leaders have more often been the unwitting victims than the dedicated masters of their impossible jobs.