John E. Wetzel
Secretary of Corrections, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections

John Wetzel, widely recognized as one of the thought leaders and voices of corrections today, was appointed Secretary of Corrections for the PA DOC in January 2011 by Governor Corbett following a 22-year career in county corrections that culminated in a position of warden at Franklin County jail where he oversaw a 20% population reduction during his tenure.  He was then reappointed by Governor Wolf in January 2015 and consecutively in January 2019.  During his tenure as Secretary, not only did DOC experience the end of a 24-year average growth of 1500 inmates per year, but also the first population reduction in PA in over four decades, with a total reduction thus far of over 4,200 inmates.  Secretary Wetzel has guided the Department in restructuring Community Corrections, the mental health systems, and significant security enhancements while at the same time, significantly reducing spending.  With 30 years of experience in the corrections field, he served as Chair of the Council of State Government’s Justice Center’s Executive Board of which he is now a member.  He also served as the recent President of the CLA (Correctional Leaders Association) formerly ASCA and a member of Harvard’s Executive Session on Community Corrections. On the federal level, he was tapped by the Obama administration to be the corrections expert on the Chuck Colson task force – which was a congressionally created group tasked with assessing the Federal Bureau of Prisons and providing the administration and Congress with recommendations on improvement.  More recently, he was named by the Trump administration to the congressionally created oversight committee to the federal First Step Act.  He is a graduate of Bloomsburg University and recipient of honorary Doctorate degrees from both Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Chestnut Hill College.

Tony Turpin
Senior Vice President Of Business Development, Facility Management at CGL Companies

Former warden and recognized criminologist Tony Turpin knows firsthand what it takes to manage and operate a correctional facility. Tony began his career in 1980 with the Georgia Department of Corrections as an entry-level correctional officer. Over the next 20 years, Tony rose through the ranks of Georgia’s correctional system, serving as Deputy Warden, Security Warden, Warden, and Superintendent for multiple facilities across the state spanning all levels of security classification. In 2002, Tony was promoted to Regional Director for all facilities in northern Georgia, where he was responsible for supervising facility wardens to ensure policy and budgetary compliance. Tony was eventually named State Supervisor and Private Prison Manager by the Georgia DOC, where he successfully secured funding to replace many old and inefficient correctional facilities across the state in addition to supervising new prison construction and renovation of many county prisons.

Voice Over:

Welcome to the 360 Justice podcast where criminal justice leaders talk about how they are solving tough social infrastructure issues, like aging facilities, insufficient funding, inadequate staffing, and an ever changing political climate. Here’s your host, Eli Gage.

Eli Gage:

Hello everyone and welcome to the 360 Justice podcast. I’m your host, Eli Gage and today I’m joined by two of the leaders in the criminal justice market today, in my opinion, Mr. Tony Turpin, who is also at CGL, and I’m gonna take a minute, Secretary Wetzel, and read this, cause I don’t know if you’ve heard Tony’s background. Tony started in 1980 with the Georgia Department of Corrections in 87. He was the deputy warden of the Macon, Georgia prison. He was then promoted the Deputy Warden of the Georgia state prison in 1990 in 1994. He was the Warden at Walker state prison. And in 1996, he was the Warden and Superintendent of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification prison. Tony, I believe that that is the death row prison in Georgia, correct?

Tony Turpin:

That is correct.

Eli Gage:

And I believe you were the youngest warden ever at the diagnostic center.

Tony Turpin:

At that time absolutely.

Eli Gage:

He later went on to become the Warden at the Lee Arrendale State Prison. And in 2002 became the Regional Director for all facilities in Northern Georgia. And prior, let’s see here in 2006, he was the State Supervisor and Private Prison Manager for the Georgia Department of Corrections.

Tony Turpin:

Correct.

Eli Gage:

And in 2012, he came over to CGL. I think Tony was our first hire after the rollups. And currently Tony is the captain of the CGL golf team and a senior vice president there. Tony, thanks for joining us and thanks for helping me host.

Tony Turpin:

Thank you, sir.

Eli Gage:

So Secretary Wetzel, you were appointed in 2011 as the Secretary of Corrections for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. Prior to that, you were, I think you began your career at the Lebanon County jail as a Correctional Officer, and then went on to Berks County, Pennsylvania as a Correctional Officer where you were also a Counselor and a Treatment Supervisor. And then in 2002, you became the Warden of the Franklin County Jail, which is, I think, where we actually first met you.

Secretary John Wetzel:

Yup, Franklin County, PA Chambersburg.

Eli Gage:

Correct. You’re a member of the Harvard Executive Session on Community Corrections, which is a joint project with Harvard and the Kennedy School Government and the National Institute of Justice. And that’s, I believe 30 kind of handpicked policymakers around the country. Is that right?

Secretary John Wetzel:

Yup.

Eli Gage:

That’s impressive. That must have you must have, you must have been in some very interesting meetings in that role.

Secretary John Wetzel:

Well, I definitely brought the room’s GPA down. That’s the one thing I can guarantee.

Eli Gage:

You’re currently the outgoing president of the Correctional Leadership Association.

Secretary John Wetzel:

Yep.

Eli Gage:

How does that feel?

Secretary John Wetzel:

It feels good to be outgoing. I mean, it was a, it was a good run as you know, um, it used to be ASCA or the Association of State Correctional Administrators, which was a more kinda I think inward focused membership, focused organization. And I think over my term, we really kind of switched to have a bigger voice in this field as corrections profile is growing. You know, we need corrections people to have input into public policy. And so that’s who I really, I think we put CLA in a better position to do that over the past two years.

Eli Gage:

So you’re happy with the direction that they’re heading now.

Secretary John Wetzel:

Absolutely. And our new president Anne Precythe from Missouri is a, just a ball of energy and you know exactly what this field needs and exactly what our organization needs. So yeah, I think we’re in good hands.

Eli Gage:

Great. So I want to start with one topic. It’s obviously top of mind for a lot of us. I know you’ve been applauded by a number of your peers in how you handled the COVID-19 situation within your system. I’m curious how you get ahead of something that large and what was the timeframe when you said we’ve got to do something now.

Secretary John Wetzel:

So I will tell you in anything, I talk about Pennsylvania department of corrections, you know, I may be the face and often the voice of the department, we have a great team and we have the best team in country. And I say that without hesitation, no disrespect to any other state, but they’re just, they just don’t have a team I do. I got my first briefing on this in either November or December when, when Secretaries of Health were getting briefings on it. And I actually did a follow-up briefing because you know in corrections we deal with influenza every year. I had three influenza outbreaks, um, this winter, which is hard to remember because ever since, you know, March, we’ve been all COVID all the time. Um, so I felt like we were kind of prepared for it. Um, and then when Pennsylvania got their first case was March 12th. Uh, March 13th is when I shut down visits. And then we got our first case, uh, like March 27th. And at that point I immediately quarantined the system, but I think we were fortunate in that. One of the things I did is I brought a public health doctor to be, uh, my advisor, my personal advisor. And, um, I think he’s probably his, name’s dr. Nick Scharff who actually used to be our doctor and now he’s in the private sector. Um, but he told me early on that first weekend, um, after we shut down visits, he said, you know, I think the critical thing here is going to be masking everybody up. And so by the next week we had both, uh, staff and inmates masked up and we just switched all our fabric shops, the mask making. And we really saw that as the linchpin. And, you know, at the time when it started, we had 45,000 inmates and, um, I’ve had 350 positive. And that, that happened in two outbreaks, one outbreak of about 40 inmates at a new prison where you were able to kind of control the spread and one outbreak of a couple hundred at an older prison that had barred cells and no AC and all that stuff. And, you know, it’s difficult to control the spread there. So, and again, but our staff doing following the protocols, I mean, early on we went, but you know, March 13th is when we ordered temperatures for everybody screening for all staff, and we’re still doing that to this day. And I actually, myself and my executive deputy Tabb Bickell over the first two people in our department to get screened. Um, cause we wanted to be out there. So I feel like we got ahead of it, you know? And, um, and our staff’s been really good at just following the protocol and, and, and I will tell you, there’s a couple of things that we weren’t prepared for the fact that people could be asymptomatic and still spread the disease that’s unique to anything. So no one in the country had an influenza plan that assumed that you weren’t going to know who was spreading it or not. And that’s why I think the masks were real important.

Tony Turpin:

The population responded to the quarantine or the shut down of visits. And how have the families responded? How have you been able to deal with that?

Secretary John Wetzel:

I’ll tell you the other good thing we did. And I got to credit my assistant Deb Sahd with this and anybody who knows me or has worked with the Department of Corrections over the past 10 years, Deb Sahd is actually the brains of this outfit. I like to say, I’m the pretty face. She’s the brain. We have been doing zoom visits for funerals and hospital visits for the last two years. That’s been, Deb’s kind of pet project. Um, you know, uh, you know, as anybody in corrections knows, like taking someone to a funeral while it’s important for the individual, sometimes the risk for our staff. So we started doing the zoom visits at funerals and got great feedback. So when we shut down visits, we immediately propped up zoom visits. And I gotta tell you, it’s probably over my nine and a half years probably been the most popular thing I’ve ever done. Every facility I go through, and I’ve been through 20 prisons in the last six weeks with my executive deputy, um, you know, we’re out there and sending stuff out. And number one question I get from our population is, are, are, are the zoom visits standing? So it’s been, you know, and I will tell you, the other thing is, especially in Pennsylvania as a state, we’re licensed life. So I have 5,000 lifers and, Tony can attest to, you know, the old heads, they control the tone of the facility and I have more compliant with my inmate population wearing masks then you will see at any grocery store in America. Our population understands how serious this is and how the potential of death or serious illness is right there. And what I’m proud to say is in Pennsylvania, we were fairly hard hit. I mean, we’re a pretty big state about 13 million. Our rate of individuals dying with COVID in prisons is seven times lower than the community. And again, that’s a testament to both my staff and the population who’s done what we’ve asked them to do,

Tony Turpin:

Absolutely.

Eli Gage:

Playing off the population. And I know this John and talking to you over the years, this is a near and dear to your heart. And I was, I understand that as of the end of July, that you’ve been able to successfully reduce your inmate population from a high of around 51,000, right when you took over to, I believe at the end of July, it was about 41,000 inmates. That’s a nearly 20% reduction in population.

Secretary John Wetzel:

Yeah. You know, so just to give you a little context. So I took this job in 2011, our population in Pennsylvania has grown by about 1500 inmates a year over the 24 years before I took over. And we were able to kind of turn that around, uh, early on in my tenure, we made some changes internally and some process changes and also passed some laws. And I’m happy to say that the end of July, we were officially down 10,000 under my tenure, which is about 20%. And 4,000 of that is since COVID happens. And that’s primarily because our strategy early in COVID, we attempted to get legislation. I don’t have, in some States, some of my colleagues have the discretion to do compassionate release. I don’t have that in Pennsylvania. So I attempted to work out a deal with, uh, with all four caucuses to give me the ability to let folks out. That fell through, you know, so we were able to use the Governor’s discretion to reprieve somebody’s sentence, but in Pennsylvania, that means if I can let them out, but I have to bring them back. So we didn’t use that much. But what we decided as a strategy, given that context is we were going to focus on our existing mechanisms to get people out and our reentry system. And knowing that courts were closing down, so we weren’t going to get new commit, we figured that if we just got really good and better at what we did and releasing people, and you know, that’s not easy in this context, making sure you have housing. And, you know, we’ve had probably every one of our halfway houses has been shut down for at least two weeks, because once they get a positive COVID case or in quarantine and can’t receive new folks. But even with all those challenges, you know, we were able to reduce our population by 4,000. And the good part for us going into this is that we were already at about 98% of our operational capacity. And so we had a prison STI Retreat that I was planning on closing in June. We delayed the closure of that. We turned that into our intake facility. So we didn’t have people coming in from the street and going to all 24 of our other prisons. They all went there so we can quarantine them and make sure COVID didn’t get in. That was another key part of our strategy. And I really got to give a shout out to the staff who obviously, when you close a prison and anyone who’s had to do that, you know, staff’s not exactly cheering for you when you close the prison. But when I announced about a month before we split the close that I was going to keep it open specifically to help us battle, COVID that staff up there just, you know, kept working and was dedicated to the department. I can’t say enough about them. And it’s such a key part of our strategy. So now we’re down to 41,000, which is obviously well below our current operational capacity, but you know, one of the things we had to do because of COVID and the notion of like social distancing and trying to apply that to a correction construct has been really challenging. So we redefined our operational capacity. And even in spite of the fact that we’re at 41,000, which is probably a 20 year low, um, to get us to where we need to get to, if we have another big wave of COVID, we still need to reduce our population by another 2000. So this has really been the biggest challenge in my career easily. But fortunately, again, both that and staffing, you know, we were at 1% vacancy rate for our security staff when this hit. And I know a lot of my colleagues around the country were at 20, 30, 40%. And then you start having people call out for COVID you’re in a real bad spot. We were very fortunate that the combination of being below operational capacity and having almost no vacancies put us in a position where we could manage it to the extent we did.

Tony Turpin:

That’s definitely impressive and certainly, you know, people realize when you’re reducing populations, whether it be on the front end or on the back end, particularly on the back end, that the coordination with other state agencies is critical. If you’re working with the Labor Department, uh, veterans, those kinds of things to try, like you said, to secure jobs so the cycle of recidivism doesn’t continue, then they don’t come back. There’s a lot of coordination involved in that. And working with state agencies, other agencies is key with that. And obviously you’ve been able to do that.

Secretary John Wetzel:

I have to give certainly my boss, the Governor credit, because one of the things I really liked about Governor Wolf, who’s my current boss and, and in his second term now has just been really great at pushing state agencies to work together. And folks may think, well, of course, they’re going to work together. That doesn’t happen. Most of my career, working with other agencies have been a real tension point, but two agencies in particular really helped us. One is the Department of Human Services and Secretary Teresa Miller personally got involved. And one of the things we were able to do is sign up most of our inmates getting out for medical assistance. So we’re at about, I’m going to say 85% of everybody getting out with their medical assistance turned on, which is critical in the COVID era. I know a lot of advocates and folks are saying we should be releasing lifers and all these people who serve decades in prison. But the reality is if you haven’t been in the community for 30 or 40 years, you don’t have insurance, you don’t have a healthcare provider. That’s not the priority group you want to be focusing to push out in the community because they’re going to be more likely to get COVID in the community. But thanks to our partnership with Department of Human Services, we’re able to have benefits turned on, able to ensure people have access to medical care, which is even more critical in COVID. And then the second agency, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has been remarkable. And you’re not gonna believe this, but it’s the truth. 90% of everybody who gets out of my system gets out with a state ID and Tony, you know, a state ID like you can’t get cough medicine without an ID.

Tony Turpin:

That’s huge.

Secretary John Wetzel:

And during COVID we work, we put our boots on the ground and we roll up our sleeves and we go to work. But, um, a lot of my, my sister agencies in the State, that’s not their world, but the Department of Transportation actually had employees going to work just to make sure that our folks got out with an ID. And so Tony, to your point, without that cooperation, we would not be in the place we’re in right now.

Tony Turpin:

That’s tremendous. One of the things that, that you mentioned talking about, uh, your vacancy rate, which is tremendous at 1% for your correctional staff, but that’s not the case, obviously, uh, throughout the country. A lot of other state corrections agencies have huge problems with recruitment and retention coming out as the outgoing president of ASCA or now CLA you have thoughts on that? How are we going to be able to address those issues, those critical issues throughout the country?

Secretary John Wetzel:

Well, let me start with this. Correctional officers, when you talk about the overused term hero or first responders, correction officers don’t jump to their, their mind. They should because they’re, there’s a tougher beat in America than inside it’s prison period. And so the reality is I’ve been fortunate here in Pennsylvania, that we have a great salary and better benefits. And so we were able to be competitive with other agencies. A lot of my colleagues around the country don’t have that. And I would suggest, If you’re not investing in your correctional staff. Cause you can build it $200 million prison, and I will also tell you that I believe that one of the reasons we’ve been able to manage this is because most of our facilities are relatively new. And so it’s easier to manage crises a newer facility. And I think that’s critical, but you’ll invest 200 million in that, but you want to nickel and dime your correctional staff. It’s ridiculous. That’s our best and most important resource. And in Pennsylvania, I’m proud to say that we invest in our most valuable resource and we benefit from that. And when I hear some of the stories of some of my colleagues, and listen we have some facilities are located in Pennsylvania. If you have a place that’s 30 minutes from a Walmart, that means you’re in the middle of nowhere. I mean, the County is called Forest County and there’s 14,000 people live in that County and almost 3000 of them are incarcerated all right. So it’s a tiny County. We have a snow mobile parking lot there. And I know a lot of my colleagues struggle with that kind of stuff, but we’re able to overcome it because we’re a good employer. And I think it’s a good workplace. I mean, my leadership team, my superintendents or wardens and deputies. We really focus on leadership development here. And we also really focus on giving our leaders in the field, the ability to be creative and, you know, push the envelope and, and take risks, uh, as long as they’re calculated risks. And I think we benefit from that in that, you know, our facilities are well-run facilities, staff are safe. Our assault rate on staff is at a decade low, even though we have more gang members incarcerated than we ever have. We have more individuals with mental illness we ever have, but, you know, we have a good workplace. And so I hope that, that some of the folks who run the country get the picture in this COVID thing that make investments up front in your system. I mean, I see some States who had significant outbreaks, you know, how to bring the National Guard in to staff their facilities, but that’s because folks haven’t invested at the front end and their correction system, and now they’re paying at the backend. So we’re definitely a pay me now or pay me later like that old commercial. And I may be dating myself a little bit, but you know, it’s much better to invest up front. Not only better, but cheaper and more efficient when we do that upfront. And I’m fortunate in Pennsylvania, we’ve done that. And I’m a beneficiary of that.

Eli Gage:

Let me ask a question because both of you guys obviously came from within the system and earned your stripes, apparently the hard way. At what point, John and Tony as well, do you say to yourself, you know, my top priority in all of doing this is population reduction, reentry, etc.? I mean day one, John, did you say there’s gotta be a better way?

Secretary John Wetzel:

No, I, you know, I really didn’t. I’ll tell you, Lebanon County kind of small facility, I grew up in Lebanon County. So I knew people who were incarcerated. I knew people who worked there and knew the culture but I went down to work at Berks County and Berks County was what I would call real jail. So Redding, Pennsylvania in the early nineties, beginning of the crack era, a big gang population, I wore sneakers to work for a reason. Okay. Cause you were gonna, you were gonna work when you got there. I mean, you were going to hustle around. There was going to be, you know, some physical confrontations, this and that. And I saw the jail population explode at that point and I was, I still am a talker. Like if I worked a block, I talked to everybody and at Berks you would be assigned a block for six months or a year. So I would know, I knew everybody’s family and, and this and that. And so strip away, all the kind of rhetoric, what you realize is that people were incarcerated or called people. And so then when you start understand their story. I mean, listen, there’s people who would say, you know, I’ve accomplished a lot in my career. Probably my proudest day, there was an inmate at Berks’s and my proud one of my proudest accomplishments, I helped the guy get his GED. When I was a CO, I would sit there after lockdown. I would pull him out and we will study. So when he got his GED, it was the greatest thing in the world. But what I realized is that there was a lot of people who were incarcerated, who didn’t have the educational opportunities I had. And so what I realized is that, you know, some of these folks if they were exposed to what I was exposed to growing up, they would probably be on the same side of bars as me. And so as I, the further I got into the field, the more I realized that our approach to corrections, and I would describe our approach like this: when anything goes wrong in society, we’ll have corrections do it. So tell me a correction system that doesn’t do drug and alcohol treatment. But also tell me if it makes sense that we would deliver drug and alcohol treatment in the jail or prison, when we can’t get any federal reimbursement, we can put someone in treatment and the feds could pay for it. Right? So what I like to say is that what I realized is that any crack in any system, and that goes for education, human services, whatever, the other end of that crevice is a jail cell. And so, as I got in the field more and more, I realized that our approach was flawed. Corrections isn’t flawed. I mean, our outcomes aren’t great anywhere, but our outcomes aren’t great because we get folks who failed out of other systems and now they can’t fail out of our system, so we have to find a way to work with them. And so I think given that context, corrections does a remarkable job. And if we did a better job of being more precise at who came to corrections and what we’re really good with is dangerous people. And, and I’ll tell you what, when you’re a high risk and you, you know, hurt people, killed people, and you’re going to spend a bunch of time with us. You’re going to come out better. I guarantee that, but we’re not going to come up better. The correction system is if you’re like someone who’s addicted or has mental health issues and don’t have any violence and don’t have a long history, you’re going to come out worse. So just stop sending people like that to us

Tony Turpin:

I agree totally. I mean, my major goal as a warden, I would love to work myself out of a job. And everything that we did and the way that I tried to function, and I know this is exactly what you’re talking about in the way that you operate, is how do we build a system around that philosophy? What do we do? How can we work ourselves out of a job? Rehabilitate or do the things that we need to do? I know that was Pollyanna, but that’s the thought process I had every day. And I’m sure you do as well.

Secretary John Wetzel:

And, and here’s the thing. I mean, here’s the reality. We are in what I will call the George Floyd era, right? Where people were saying like defund the police and defund corrections because of the racial disparities in our system. Well, first of all, we don’t pick who’s coming to prison, right? So those systemic racism issues are further upstream than corrections. But I would tell you that when you look at systems that have reformed and have reduced population, you see less of a disparity, and I will tell you, I won’t speak in, in broad terms, I’ll speak in very specific terms. So in Pennsylvania, as Eli, as you started this out with, we have 10,000 less individuals incarcerated. 82% of that population is nonwhite. So it’s an absolute fact that by our work and by our focusing on using state prisons with more precision, our system has gotten less disparate. And if you will, we could say we’ve gotten less racist because we focused on improving our system. And I think in the George Floyd era, we, we as corrections, shouldn’t shy away from discussions around racial disparity, but I would also tell you that when we make better decisions that who has to come to prison, those things get better. And I think that there’s a, at least some silver lining in the cloud that is, you know, some of them race discussion happening in America right now.

Eli Gage:

I’m going to switch gears a little bit on you here, Secretary Wetzel. And you mentioned a minute ago, pushing the envelope. I’ve always considered you a person that was pushing the envelope. I remember, uh, you and I in San Diego at the ACA show, and you were telling me about some of the, kind of, out of the box, things that you were doing. One of which was the data-driven outcomes. The other one was the, you know, maybe to a lesser extent, the paperless mail system, but I felt like I was sitting there talking to a Silicon Valley tech guy. And I actually knew better. But the data it’s important to us we’ve, you know, at CGL we’ve, we pride ourselves on having 45 years of data. Whether we do enough with that, uh, yet to be seen, but I was really intrigued by what you’re doing with it. And I, and as I was reading up about it, I gathered that you’re using data to not only judge yourself and your system, but also to get ahead of some of the internal things. And I think what you mentioned to me was you were able to, by using data, prevent some of the violence within, within your prisons. Tell us about this, I think you call it the intelligent management system.

Secretary John Wetzel:

Yeah. So one of the things that we’ve not done, a good job, and listen, as, as I’ve told you the only thing I’ve done from the time I was 20 years old to now, 31 years later, is work in corrections. And I will tell you that, uh, we do a terrible job of quantifying our work and, and we do even a worse job of telling people what our outcomes look like. So I decided when I got this job in 2011 and I’ve benefited again from the work of my predecessor, Jeff Beard, who built like a really good infrastructure of research, a great research department, I said, you know what, here’s what we’re going to do. Very simple from my first day on this job. And this actually started in Franklin County. When I first started working with, was you all at CGL where we decided we were going to say, listen, we’re going to measure everything we do and we’re going to do this magical thing, this new age, cutting edge thing. When we measure it, if things get better by what we’re doing, we’re going to keep doing that and do it more. If they get worse, we’re going to stop doing. And so for me, it’s not like I’m not some techie guy. I decided early on like, listen, we’re just gonna, we’re just gonna use this thing called the scientific method. And we’re going to try new things and we’re going to push the envelope and I can keep, I really encourage my staff, give me suggestions about how we can do something better. And we’re going to measure it. If what you say works, we’re going to do it. And if you go to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections website, which is just simply Cor, short for corrections, cor.pa.gov, we have everything on there. As a matter of fact, I just approved a public facing COVID dashboard, where you can see by site, how many positive COVID cases we’ve had, how many active COVID cases we have both staff and inmate. You can see our population reduction. You can see whatever you want from that public facing website. And we do that for everything. I mean, 2013, like the rest of the country, we decided we were overusing solitary confinement of restrictive housing. So we said, we’re going to reduce it, but we’re not going to reduce it at the detriment or staff. So yeah, we measure everything. As a matter of fact, if we’re doing something new, we’re going to do it. We’re going to do it in a pilot, maybe multiple sites, we’re going to measure it. And then if it works, we’re going to scale it. System wide. I’ll give you a for instance, in the COVID era. So one of the things we started doing is testing the sewage for COVID rates and how that works: about 30% of individuals, um, shed the COVID through their excrement or through their stool. So when you have 2000, 3000 people at a prison, you can take stool samples and you can get a good, accurate baseline of your COVID level at a facility. And I know a lot of the critics of corrections and advocates are really pushing systems to mass test. We haven’t done that and we haven’t done it. Not because those topics, I don’t believe in it cause I’m not a philosopher. But I have to make decisions that impact people’s lives. And what I know is that some of the COVID testing at this point of individuals, best case scenario is a 20% error rate. And the error rates higher for asymptomatic individuals. But stool samples, they work well. So we just started, we started with three facilities and we did baseline testing where we’re testing the sewage every three days, which is as quick as you can test it. And what that does that give us an early warning sign. So if all of a sudden sampled three prisons, two in Centre County, the area we’re concerned about, and then we sampled a prison in another area to give us the comparison. All three came back with no COVID presence, which doesn’t mean we don’t have one or two people, but it does mean that we don’t have a lot of people with COVID in our facilities. But if we’re testing it every three days and all of a sudden we see active COVID somewhere, it’s an early warning sign. That’s using research and data. That’s not a heavy lift. I mean, I got to tell you the machine to do that $2,000. Now I would tell you, you couldn’t pay me $2,000, be the one collecting it, but that’s why they call me Secretary. But I will tell you we’re scaling that to our entire system. I want to know, like one of the things that’s been frustrating throughout COVID, and I know we kinda got off COVID Eli, but one of the things have been frustrating is because a lot of the criticism of corrections as a whole has been like corrections is conspiring to hide. No one’s hiding anything. Like if anyone’s concerned about people who were incarcerated and trying to keep them safe and trying to keep the staff state, it’s the people running prisons. We care about this, but that’s an example of taking kind of some academic kind of heady stuff, translating it down to a practical, real world applications and doing that to have a better impact on the system. So we use data for there’s nothing I do without data. And if I don’t have data on it, I look at the research and we make our best guess and we measure it and adjust. And that’s, that’s just how the Pennsylvania department of corrections is oriented.

Eli Gage:

Is that, is that fairly mainstream or other States doing this? I don’t think so.

Secretary John Wetzel:

Well, I don’t, I don’t know how mainstream it is. I think that if all the systems in the country haD equal resources to us, I think most would do it. I think some people are just old school kind of common sense folks. I’m fairly skeptical at this point, that common sense even exists. So, uh, all I know is what the data tells me. And I think this is one of the evolutions that corrections needs to make. There’s no reason for us in 2020 to do anything that research doesn’t suggest that makes sense and that we’re not measuring and adjusting based on the measurements. And that translates to every aspect of my operation. There is no aspect of my operation. Now we’re not measuring and adjusting based on the measurement.

Eli Gage:

And the paperless mail system is still in effect correct?

Secretary John Wetzel:

Yeah. We’re actually getting ready to scale it. So we have a big coming out in the next, I’m going to say two months, but we’re actually going to scale it. So right now all personal mail comes in only through, uh, scanned in. And then, uh, if you’re going to send a package, we actually created what we call the security processing center, which is basically like custom. So every package, every musical instrument, anything like that goes through that center, where we have staff members dedicated to searching it where every piece of mail is hit buy a canine. And we also use technology to scan it, to make sure that there’s no drugs coming in. Obviously that’s a big financial investment. I sent 60 staff members out to the hospital and unfortunately in my career, uh, two, two years ago, I had to, uh, proceed over and eulogize one of my staff members who was killed in the line of action. And I will tell you that you can’t have a financial discussion with me when you’re talking about my staff’s lives. And that’s why I think this is the wave of the future. So we’re putting a bid out that will include legal mail being emailed in only.That will also include the ability to do video visits through the tablet and do phone calls through the tablet. And I’ll just do a commercial for that: number one reason for fights in Pennsylvania, fights over the phone and telling me that it’s been like that for what, a hundred years, as long as there’ve been since Alexander Graham bell created the first prison phone, there’s been fights over the phone. And so we were putting all that stuff remotely and the reality is if someone can sit in her cell and be on the phone and visit their families, there’s a lot less madness that happens in the housing unit. And ultimately it means safer prisons and less staff getting hurt and that’s what real we’re really about.

Tony Turpin:

Agreed, I think it’s fabulous. And you know, that was, again, that’s just a tremendous way to operate a facility, uh, is looking at outcomes in the facility. And that’s what you’re doing that to reduce all the major indicators make it much safer.

Eli Gage:

That’s good stuff. Well, speaking of pushing the envelope, you were one of the, I think you were one of the early adopters, Secretary Wetzel, when you were at Franklin County on outsourcing maintenance.

Secretary John Wetzel:

Yeah. So it’s interesting to me. I did that in ’06. And I was a County warden guy, you know, and in the County, and listen, I’m a fiscal conservative. Anyone who knows me knows my orientation is I’m a fiscal conservative, even though I worked for a, uh, ultra progressive governor, I think he appreciates my fiscal conservativness cause he doesn’t wanna spend more money and corrections and then he has to, right? But, um, so in Franklin County it was like, I approved, and it’s funny now because my budget in Franklin County was probably about, I’m going to say maybe four or $5 million, where I approved every purchase. I now run a system that has a $2.7 billion budget. And I don’t ever see anything under $50,000 you know. But I would, I would like be like, what do you mean you need to do shirt, come to my office, let me look at your shirt and make sure it’s worn out. You know, Tony, you know what I’m talking about. Just cover that hole up. We got here, here, I got a patch here, cover that up. And one of the things that we were spending a lot of money on is emergency repairs. And so I saw the genius of privatizing maintenance was making costs, finite. And I got to give, I got to give my buddy Dexter Stanphill, all the credit for that because he’s the guy who first pitched to me. And immediately when someone pitches something to me, I immediately think it’s a sales job, right? I thought about it. And so in my context in Franklin County, here’s what crushed me. My maintenance staff, who’s really good were as good at preventative maintenance. And so how that translates is you get a lot of big repairs. You get a lot big crisises and then corrections context. And in most systems you have a sellout it’s devastating. You have three or four cells out, it’s even worse. You have like a sewage blockage that takes a whole block out, you got problems. And if you can’t resolve it quickly. So what the structure of the contract in Franklin County, which honestly in ’06, I thought this was the wave of the future. What, what happened is, and the way we structured the contract was the County paid for supplies, the contractor paid for big repairs. So it made, so I didn’t, I had no question whatsoever. I didn’t have to worry about a sewage blockage or a roof leak that was going to crush my budget because my maintenance budget, I knew when I got my budget in the beginning of the fiscal year, it made it very finite. And I would argue that the private sector is incentivized when you search a contract like that, to do preventative maintenance. As a matter of fact, it’s the first time I ever heard of a CMMS. A maintenance system where they actually like barcoded every piece of equipment, every filter, whatever. And me as the warden, I could pull up the CMMS and I could pull up and I could see if my maintenance staff were doing preventative maintenance because they had to go in there and they had to scan the barcode. And, and what happened magically is I had less big repairs. And so I really thought it was the wave of the future. Now jump to the, the state system I’m in right now, little union state. So it was, it was pretty much a nonstarter for us to, to privatize any service is, is a very difficult thing. And I now work for a, uh, again, a progressive Democrat who is privatization of this is not on the table, but I would tell you that I still think that the, and that construct is one that makes a heck of a lot of sense. And just the ability to make your maintenance costs in a correctional facility finite is… I can’t now people who operate prisons, get it like your maintenance. I mean, security levels are obviously we think of security. First, your maintenance staff are the critical piece and I have 24 prisons. And I can tell you which prisons have great maintenance staff and which prisons could use a little improvement because you know, you have some barriers and the places that could use need a little improvement, you see little stuff, you see pipes bursting, you see steam lines going down on a regular basis. And how that translates to me as the guy who’s in charge of this budget is, Oh, wait a second, I need overtime? I got a locked down a prison? I got to have extra staff on because I got to bring an outside contractor in to fix this? So yeah, I mean, I, I really think that, I thought in ’06, and I sit here and in 2020 saying I think if you’re, uh, oriented to privatizing, maintenance is a no brainer to me. There’s other areas that a lot of folks privatized that I’m not sold on. I think maintenance is an area. Assuming you construct a contract in a manner that incentivizes good practices, which is how our contract was constructed in Franklin County. I think it makes a heck of a lot of sense.

Tony Turpin:

I agree. You know, one of the things that I always say about the maintenance is that we want to keep the routine, routine. When you go in, in the morning, you want to make sure that the water is running, there’s hot water, that they have the ability to take showers, the commodes are flushing, all those things that could be very problematic when you have failure inside a correctional facility, the maintenance is key. Very key.

Secretary John Wetzel:

Well, look, I had a prison in Albion, which is in Erie, Pennsylvania, which if you know anything about Erie, it’s winter in Erie from late August until, uh, mid June. And, uh, and we actually had the water, the water tower, and this actually isn’t hate on their maintenance staff is it’s freezing out there and it was not a great construction project quite frankly. We had a water tower freeze. We didn’t have water in the middle of winter for four days. And what you want to talk about, if you look back, I bet that four days of a year, which is what 1% of a year, I bet we spent three, four or 5% of our budget in that four days, so the cost benefit on having good maintenance, whatever that looks like pays for itself, no brainer.

Eli Gage:

I’m sure you don’t track the outsourced maintenance market, but since 2006, we’ve seen a lot more. Even, even in the last five years, we’ve seen a lot more outsourced Maintenance RFPs coming out there. So I guess in the world of corrections time, that’s not so slow, but it’s starting to take root.

Secretary John Wetzel:

Yeah. Let’s, let’s not ignore the elephant in the room. Every state is going to come out of this COVID situation in some serious financial states and maybe the feds who are the only entity who can print money are going to bail States out. I’m skeptical that it’s going to happen. So you’re going to have, you know, folks, my colleagues around the country, myself, I’m going to have decisions at what I spend money on. And if I have to do a $75 million cut, what am I going to do? So I think my guess would be, if you can get a finite cost savings and make your maintenance costs, finite, I got to think that in the next several months, and certainly the next budget cycle, as people were trying to figure out how to be creative and save money, you know, it’s going to become a popular service would be my guess.

Eli Gage:

So secretary, what’s next for you? Could you run for president?

Secretary John Wetzel:

Well, looking at the candidates, maybe.

Eli Gage:

Could you run for president, please?

Secretary John Wetzel:

I have no, uh, uh, political interest whatsoever, but listen, I I’ve spent 30 couple years in this field at some point in the next year or two, I’m going to get out. Unfortunately, I’m a workaholic who loves this field. So I’m going to stay engaged in the field. I’m really looking forward to kind of start my own business. And, and really what I love about this job is problem solving. And it’s high stakes problem solving where real lives are at stake. So I’m going to take that and, you know, travel around the country and help systems, help my colleagues. You know, partner with organizations like you all to, to just bring kind of my approach to corrections, which is a data driven, um, logical kind of common sense approach to problem solving, in corrections. I’m gonna, you know, take that around the country. So, you know, I have time to serve yet, and certainly I would never leave this, this my system, my staff, my team. We have a really close knit team. I’m not leaving Pennsylvania until we get through this crisis. But at some point here, you know, you’ve been in this field this long, the end of the day, you start seeing the end. And the end is in sight for me, but it’s not, It’s just the end, me being on call 24/7. And, and what Tony can tell you, and what a lot of folks don’t understand is like, my life evolves around this field. So I wake up probably every two hours checking my phone. I became a County warden in January, 2002. I’ve been on call every moment of my life. But I’m really looking forward to just a life where I can enjoy life a little bit and still have an impact on the field. I love this field. I think it’s the greatest field in the world. I think the people who work for corrections are literally heroes and some of the greatest people in the world, but I am looking forward to a life of love, peace and joy coming up here in the next couple of years,

Eli Gage:

I would say, send me your resume, but I have it sitting here right in front of me.

Secretary John Wetzel:

You are always a sales guy. I do appreciate you though. I appreciate this opportunity.

Secretary John Wetzel:

Secretary Wetzel, thank you so much for making the time. I know you’re a very busy man. Tony Turpin, thank you for your time as well.

Tony Turpin:

Thank you, sir.

Eli Gage:

I appreciate it.

Voice Over:

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