Following over four years of successful trainings to prison professionals around the country, the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) entered into a cooperative agreement with CJI to expand its Managing Prison Restrictive Housing Populations program and to create a Managing Jail Restrictive Housing Populations curriculum. This effort came in response to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) “Report and Recommendations Concerning the Use of Restrictive Housing” in 2016 that contained a set of guiding principles recommended to promote staff and inmate safety and security in prison and jail restrictive housing programs.
In the summer of 2017, NIC/CJI developed the first-of-its-kind jail program, incorporating the DOJ guiding principles. The curriculum was piloted in Aurora, Colorado on September 11-14, 2017. Jail and mental health leaders from the following agencies were selected to participate in the pilot:
- Las Vegas, Nevada
- Prince George’s County, Maryland
- Lafayette Parish, Louisiana
- Los Angeles County, California
- Minnehaha County, South Dakota
- New York City, New York
- Santa Cruz County, California
- Uintah County, Utah
- Washtenaw County, Michigan
The training, facilitated by experienced correctional administrators and mental health professionals, enabled the participants to:
- Examine restrictive housing practices within their own agencies, and compare those practices against DOJ Guiding Principles;
- Participate in interactive skill-building activities and action planning to determine strategies for their agencies to safely reduce the use of restrictive housing; and
- Share challenges, and promising practices and recommendations for the implementation of the Guiding Principles with peers from across the United States.
The second Managing Jail Restrictive Housing Populations took place at NIC’s Training Academy November 13-16.
