Changing times at Conn. prisons

Much of the criminal justice system has changed over the three decades that Rollin Cook has worked in prisons. At the beginning of his career, the main job of correction officers was to warehouse inmates — make sure the jails and prisons were secure, that the prisoners made it to their court hearings, that the gates opened and closed.

“They didn’t hire me because I could think. They didn’t hire me because I was empathetic. They didn’t hire me because I was a problemsolver,” Cook recalled of his first job in the field, in his home state, Utah. “They hired me because I had athletic ability, and I had size. That’s the reality of it.”

That isn’t why Gov. Ned Lamont chose Cook to be the commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Correction, however. It was because Cook is a proponent of criminal justice reform in Utah, where he was prison commissioner.

The philosophical underpinning of corrections has shifted over the years, from punishment to rehabilitation, and Cook believes prison staff have a crucial role to play in the changing times. He spoke about his approach to corrections during a recent questionandanswer interview.

Question: How do you plan on continuing Connecticut’s criminal justice reforms championed by former Gov. Dannell Malloy and your predecessor, Scott Semple?

Answer: We’ve tried to really make a concerted effort to reach out to the communities, and to the advocates, to the incarcerated, to the previously incarcerated, and really begun to push it to a new level. To me, that’s one of the reasons why they brought me in. There’s been a ton of talk, and we’ve done some reform here in Connecticut, but there’s still a lot of things to do. Our plan is to really focus around reentry.

We’ve been working hard. In fact we’re getting to the point where we have so much information, we have so many things and so many projects, that we’re having to get them in line and sort of prioritize them. We’ll be focusing a lot on things like employment, housing, family reunification, treatment, all that stuff that is so important to someone being a success, and, again, engaging the advocates in the community, make them a big part of it. They’ve been asking for it, so here it comes. It’s coming.

Q: Cutting down on restrictive housing and making sure inmates spend less time in their cells was a priority of yours in Utah. Is that also one of your goals in Connecticut, and what challenges does implementing that pose?

A: It is. It continues to be a priority, and we continue to work on it. There’s a lot of challenges. It requires sort of a complete change of mindset. Corrections has changed so much in the last five years, and a lot in the last ten. But it’s just been such a steep change regarding restricted housing, regarding corrections reform. It’s extremely challenging for employees who … have been trained for years in one sort of set of thinking, and now are having to make those types of changes.

Also, the architecture of many of the buildings that we manage our incarcerated populations in, many of them are old. Some of the newer ones are not the same model that we would want to do programming and rehabilitation, all that kind of stuff.

Trying to also prepare those who are incarcerated — this is something people don’t think about. You’ve had someone who’s been in restricted housing for longer periods of time, or had a different way of being managed, they’re human beings. And so you suddenly take them out of that environment, plug them into a general population, and they start to have challenges. So, we have to make sure when we move those folks, we’re stepping them down, that we’re doing solid mental health evaluations and all those kind of things. The list is off the charts as far as how many challenges [there are], but we know it’s our responsibility, and we know it’s the right thing to do. But it takes time.