TURNING IN THE KEYS
Warden retiring after 35-year career at prison
After more than three decades working at the Berks County Prison, Warden Janine L. Quigley is preparing to retire.
At a prison board meeting Wednesday, Quigley announced she would be retiring on March 16. That will bring to close a 35-year-career at the prison, one which started as a receptionist and ended with nearly seven years at the institution’s helm.
“I truly have enjoyed the opportunity to serve here in Berks County and I would not have wanted to be anywhere else,” she told the board. “We have teams across the county that have done phenomenal work and I’m grateful to have been a part of it. Thank you so much.”
In a letter Quigley wrote to the board, the 55-year-old said it was simply time to bring her long career to a close.
After 35 years of service in
the county prison system, she wrote, she could not have asked for a more rewarding career despite the unique challenges of working in a correctional facility.
“We are very fortunate in Berks County to have such a solid and purposeful criminal justice system,” she wrote. “I am grateful for the many incredibly talented and dedicated professionals that I have had the pleasure to work with over three decades. We often united into a team to tackle many tough issues to enhance the lives of staff, inmates and the community as a whole.”
Quigley wrote that she doesn’t regret spending her entire career in Berks.
“I have given my heart and soul to the operation of the jail system and to the people we have served,” she wrote. “I’ve witnessed acts of courage, compassion and strength in the most difficult of situations and appreciate deeply the opportunity to have those times embedded in my memory as I change course in my life.”
Quigley rose through the ranks at the prison. Beginning as a receptionist in 1986, she would become warden in May 2014 after being selected from 20 applicants from a nationwide search.
Commissioner Kevin S. Barnhardt said at the time that the members of the prison board concluded Quigley had the talent, experience and leadership best suited for the position.
Building a legacy
Quigley has been credited for helping to build innovative programs at the prison during her tenure.
One of those was the formation of a Special Operations Group when she was deputy warden of operations.
Horrified by an incident at the Cambria County Prison in which a prisoner was killed by guards after taking another guard hostage, she wanted to ensure there wouldn’t be a similar tragedy in Berks.
Despite some resistance from the union representing the corrections officers, who objected to armed officers inside the prison, the prison board took Quigley’s suggestion and formed the Special Operations Group, the first of its kind in Pennsylvania. The 14-member force was trained to fire weapons that shoot rubber bullets and subdue inmates in emergencies.
Quigley has also used her platform to speak out about mental health issues in correctional facilities, explaining that on any given day more than half the inmates at the Berks County Prison are dealing with mental illness.
Many of these individuals are convicted of relatively minor crimes, offenses that stem from their disease rather than an intent to do harm. They tend to stay in jail longer and are more likely to return than those without mental illness, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars to house and support in the process.
It’s a systemic criminal justice problem that produces a grim pattern. But the warden and county leaders have been working to break that pattern by developing tools to direct those with mental illness toward treatment services that could help them control the behavior that gets them into trouble.
The effort began in 2015 when Berks became one of the first counties to join the Stepping Up Initiative, a program that unites government officials, law enforcement leaders and mental health professionals to divert nonviolent offenders with mental illness away from prison.
They have even been recognized for that work. The county was named a Stepping Up Innovator — one of only 11 counties in the U.S. and the first in Pennsylvania — in 2019 for its expertise in collecting information about the people in its prison who have a mental illness.
Kudos all around
Commissioners Chairman Christian Y. Leinbach commended Quigley on her body of work following the announcement of her retirement. He said he was grateful to have been able to serve the county alongside her and that there are two things about her career that really stand out.
“We are in a day and age where people don’t stay with the same company or the same organization their entire career,” he said. “But Janine has. She started her career here, and she will finish her career here.
“But, possibly more significantly, she got to the top position. She was the first female warden in Berks County history, and she was a female in a male-dominated industry.”
District Attorney John T. Adams said he is going to miss Quigley for her leadership and innovation. He specifically thanked her for the work she has done during the coronavirus pandemic to make sure the wheels of justice continued to turn.
“You are an important cog in the criminal justice system here in Berks County,” he said, noting that she played a large role in the criminal justice system continuing to operate during the coronavirus pandemic while other county’s systems came to a stop. “We continued to process cases, to prosecute cases and frankly we couldn’t have done it without the innovative assistance from the jail.”
Barnhardt, who serves as chairman of the prison board, seconded that sentiment.
“What a way to end a career — with a pandemic,” he said. “But, if not for you and your staff, things could have been catastrophic based on what we heard from other jails across the country.”
Barnhardt said he was particularly grateful to Quigley for the time she spent sharing her perspective and expertise on criminal justice with statewide and national organizations searching for ways to reform the system.
“Anytime you were asked to do something you never said no,” he said. “You have always taken time to improve and uplift the criminal justice system here.”
He said that the two words that come to mind when he thinks of Quigley’s legacy are compassion and fairness.
Following the meeting, Barnhardt said Chief Deputy Warden Jeffrey Smith would be named acting warden until a permanent replacement is selected.