Lancaster County Prison is making every effort to retain correctional officers and provide them the best available training, including de-escalation and crisis intervention training.
The results are evident in day-to-day operations, Investigator Justin Hackler said at last week’s Prison Stat meeting. “You can just see the quality of the officers improving,” he said, in the way they use their experience and the tactics they’ve learned.
The prison’s many programs help, too, he said. Inmates look forward to classes and activities, so they’re motivated to avoid fights and other forms of misconduct that would bar them from being allowed to attend.
The inmates know that the staff and administration are invested in their welfare, Warden Cheryl Steberger said.
“Environment drives behavior,” Warden Cheryl Steberger said. “When the inmates know that we care … you’re going to have a better outcome.”
Held periodically, Prison Stat gives county and prison officials and the general public the opportunity to review and discuss the facility’s data on security, staffing, recidivism and more. The goal is to improve performance and outcomes.
On Friday, the prison launched its changeover to a new jail management software system, known as ATIMS. Besides making operations more efficient and largely paperless, officials say it will provide vastly enhanced options for data collection and analysis.
Last week’s Prison Stat presentation, held Aug. 13, covered January through June. The slides are here (PDF) on the county website. Here are five takeaways:
1. Intakes and mental illness
Researchers say the U.S. as a whole is suffering from overlapping mental health and substance abuse crises. That can be seen at the County Prison, where the number of inmates admitted with a severe mental illness (SMI) continues to rise.
Inmates with an SMI now make up around 13% of the prison population, up from 7% to 8% a few years ago, Deputy Warden Joe Shiffer said. Many inmates are being admitted with dual diagnoses, he said, involving both mental illness and substance abuse disorders. Moreover, cases are increasing in severity and intensity.
The prison’s average monthly SMI population rose to 83 in the first half of 2024, versus 76 in 2023. That in turn had been a sharp increase from an average of 54 in 2021. In May and June, the average hit 100.
The majority of Mental Illness & Substance Abuse (MISA) inmates stay fewer than 100 days. However, some stay for a very long time, skewing the average, and longer wait times for admission to state hospitals is pushing lengths of stay upward, Shiffer and Reentry Services Coordinator Christina Fluegel said.
Use of force, assaults and suicides
The County Prison documented 104 uses of force by staff through the first six months of 2024. That’s up a little from 2023, when 82 uses of force took place over the equivalent period. Hackler noted that different criteria were used prior to 2023, so earlier years’ data are not “apples to apples” comparisons with 2023 and 2024.
Generally, incidents tend to peak in late spring or early summer, when temperatures rise and more inmates are leaving and re-entering the building.
Two inmates alone accounted for eight of the incidents in January, Hackler said. Responding to a question from Commissioner Alice Yoder, he said prison staff develop individualized plans for inmates involved in use of force incidents or assessed to be high-risk. Staff members try to be proactive, and treatment is a “huge part of it,” he said.
Hackler and Steberger said they expect force to be needed less often at the county’s new correctional facility. The existing building’s housing units have 100 beds and no air conditioning; its replacement will have no more than 64 beds per unit and full climate control.
Assault numbers were low in 2023 and are staying low in 2024. Likely reasons, according to the Prison Stat report include more experienced officers and the fact that all inmates are now issued their own tablet, which eliminates a source of conflict.
As with use of force, the criteria for the assault data changed between 2022 and 2023, Hackler said.
As for suicide attempts — defined as an incident serious enough to require emergency room treatment — there have been zero so far this year.
Staff are extremely vigilant, Shiffer said, and will err on the side of caution in deciding to place individuals on suicide watch and get mental health involved.
An increase in prison suicides led to the formation of a task force in 2015, and Parsons and Steberger made prevention one of their top priorities when they took office as commissioner and warden the following year. While there’s no way to completely eliminate the chance of a suicide, the turnaround has been “pretty incredible,” Parsons said.
“It’s huge,” Steberger said.
Contraband
Interdictions of drugs and weapons are up in 2024 compared with 2023. Five weapons were confiscated through June 2024, versus four in all of 2023.
Many of the weapons are shanks fashioned from the battery casing in inmates’ tablets or parts stripped from fans. The prison could remove those items from the environment, “but that’s not what we want to do,” Steberger said. Staff are meeting with the tablet vendor to discuss a fix, Hackler said.
The prison uses strip searches and body scanners to find contraband. Kent Kroehler of the advocacy group Have a Heart asked if body scanners could be used to better advantage at the new correctional facility to reduce or eliminate strip searches. Body scanners don’t catch everything, Steberger said, and contraband is a safety risk: “I am not for moving away from strip searches occurring.”
Of the 10 incidents of drug contraband so far this year, six involved diversion from the prison’s Medication Assisted Treatment or MAT program for substance abuse. The prison continues to evaluate its MAT protocols, Shiffer said, but declined to elaborate.
Officials have previously said that MAT participants are handcuffed to prevent diversion. Advocate and researcher Gail Groves Scott has criticized the practice and called on the prison to discontinue it.
The hope is that as MAT expands, there will be less drug diversion, Shiffer said, because inmates will be able to enroll in the program legally. That’s what other facilities say they’ve seen, Steberger said.
Staffing and overtime
As of June 30, the prison employed 195 correctional officers, 85% of its allotted complement of 229 and up by 19 from its post-pandemic low of 176 in 2021.
On balance, “we’re in a good place” with staffing, Deputy Warden Miguel Castro said. That said, while overtime decreased in 2022 and 2023, it’s likely to be up in 2024.
That’s due to the medical needs of the prison population: Officers are making more “med runs” and serving more shifts guarding inmates admitted to the hospital.
This is another issue on which the move to the new correctional facility should help, Steberger said. It’s to have a fully equipped clinic and its own pharmacy, allowing far more medical care to be provided in-house.
Recidivism
The prison’s New Beginnings program, which prepares participants for post-release life, is seeing consistent enrollment, with 80 graduates in 2023 and nearly 40 through the first half of 2024.
At the three-year mark, recidivism rates for graduates rise to around 65%, about the same as Pennsylvania’s statewide average. Asked if more support for reentrants could help, Steberger answered emphatically that yes, it could.
Her team is doing as much or more to help reentrants succeed than any comparable facility, she said, “but I need community resources. … Others have to raise their hand and want to help out, too.”
