You are the newly appointed warden of the Cedarville County Jail. Because there are many problems existing in the jail administration in Cedarville, you’ve been brought in as a change agent. You’ve come to your position from a previous position in Illinois in the same capacity. You’re known there for being an entrepreneurial and transformational leader. You’ll bring with you part of your strategic management team: your deputy warden for human resources and your deputy warden for administration.
The jail in Cedarville is a recently built incarceration facility with the latest in security technology and inmate housing for the two separate parts of the jail: the Adult Offenders Facility and the Juvenile Facility. The physical space serves as a model for this type of incarceration facility. There is a willingness on the part of the county government to put additional revenue and resources into the facility to make it work—you have a honeymoon period of two years to do this.
Among the issues raised in your appointment documents as CEO to this facility are the following: Security issues and keeping inmates inside the prison are the paramount concerns. Beyond this, strategic management needs to be strengthened with additional talent in the area of financial management. The accounting system is in disarray.
There are employee morale problems. Officers aren’t properly trained in the use of restraint and safety techniques. There are some drug and alcohol abuse problems among the employees. Women have traditionally been employed only in the lower clerical ranks. The jail has a macho culture, which the county wants to see changed to a more care-taking culture with an emphasis on rehabilitation and training for inmates and a special-needs program for juvenile offenders. Counseling, library, and chaplain services are not available to staff or inmates. The organization could outsource (privatize) gardening, laundry, and janitorial services more cheaply than by keeping these services in-house.
There will be a state review of how juvenile offenders are managed in Cedarville. If there are continuing problems in this area, the state is considering a voucher program to enable juvenile offenders to be moved to the Catholic Juvenile Male Institutional Facility, a nonprofit organization outside Cedarville, or to the Raleigh Institution for Young Men, a private detention center in Cedarville. If the review is bad, the Cedarville jail stands to lose a substantial portion of its budget.
Conversely, if the state review shows that juveniles should be retained at Cedarville, the state and federal governments will kick in with substantial grant-in-aid funding. The county supervisors want you to accomplish some major strategic tasks within your first 3 months in office.
Your assignment is to develop the following for the Cedarville Jails:
mission statement,
statement of goals, and
a SWOT analysis.