Transparency Talks
Dive deep into the power of honesty, openness, and authenticity. The Federal Bureau of Prisons first ever podcast, Transparency Talks, will pull back the curtain on real stories, tough conversations, and the truth behind corrections. Transparency isn’t just a buzzword, it’s a way of life. Join us and discover how clarity can enhance communication and build stronger connections with the public and community partners.
Transparency Talks
S1E8 | Rebuilding BOP Training and Wellness
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Note: Joshua J. Smith served as Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons at the time this interview was recorded.
Training and wellness are inseparable in corrections. The job loads the nervous system with chronic stress: hypervigilance, moral injury, and repeated exposure to conflict. On this episode of Transparency Talks, former Deputy Director Smith sits down with the Chief of Employee Wellness, Dr. Jason Gabel, to unpack the data around staff wellness and how we normalize peer support, teach stress physiology, build recovery rituals, and train leaders to recognize burnout signals early.
Meet The New Training Leader
SPEAKER_00All right, we're back with another episode of Transparency Talks. And this one, as most of them, I'm very excited about. We're going to talk about training. So today we've got Mr. Gable here with us, the newest acting uh what is the official title?
SPEAKER_01Senior Deputy Assistant Director over Training and HRMD.
SPEAKER_00We need to make that a little longer.
SPEAKER_01It is long.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. It is long. Well, listen, thank you for being here. Thank you for being willing to come and be on video. You know, as we get started, first, tell me a little bit about you. When you started with the agency, what that looked like to get you to where you're at now.
SPEAKER_01Sure. I did my doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And I spent three years in the state forensic psychiatric hospital. And it was time for internship. And I had a mentor that told me you absolutely have to do an internship with the Bureau of Prisons. I didn't know anything about the Bureau of Prisons, but I agreed.
Career Roots And Early Lessons
SPEAKER_01And when I started interviewing for those positions, I was blown away by the quality of training that was offered. And I was lucky to match with the Bureau of Prisons at the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. It's a fantastic training year. I ended up staying on with the agency as a postdoctoral fellow at the medical center in Rochester. Again, it was supposed to be a year assignment. I loved the institution. I loved the work. And I ended up staying for 15 years. After that, I spent about five years as one of the regional psychology services administrators. And now I've been in DC for approximately a year as the chief of our brand new employee wellness branch.
SPEAKER_00And, you know, hearing you talk early on when I got here, you could just tell your passion for training for our staff for employee wellness. And, you know, we know training and that goes hand in hand. Why are you so passionate about that?
SPEAKER_01You know, my passion for employee wellness started pretty early in my career, uh, pretty close to when I started. And it was largely a result of seeing people that I worked with, people I cared about, my new friends, um, deeply wounded by the work
Why Wellness Must Come First
SPEAKER_01we do. And as an agency, we weren't really having conversations about it. Um, at that time, our employee wellness strategy largely consisted of a presentation, a short presentation during annual training that said if you're struggling, call EAP, get yourself some help. And I just thought how grossly inadequate that approach was. And I started digging in and started looking at the research, like you've done for many, many years. And what we know is there is truly a mental health crisis across law enforcement, and corrections has some of the worst outcomes out there. And so I felt for a long time we have to do more. And this was really an opportunity for me to step up and be part of that.
SPEAKER_00I'm just
The Training Freeze And Backlogs
SPEAKER_00gonna say it. We inherited a mess on training. Yes. As I've been out in the field, I think now 40 institutions so far. I fill my book up with notes and comments from staff. And over and over and over again, I've written down training or lack thereof. We're not getting enough of this. We don't understand this. We came in, MSTC was had been pretty much closed this last year. We're leaving staff woefully inadequate for their roles that they're we're asking them to do. And you've been in some of the meetings as we've worked, and we've just said that this, we're fixing this. This is not going to continue the way that it is. Before we get into the things that we've been doing to improve it, let's just talk about what we inherited. What are you finding now that you're in moving into that training role, uh, evaluating all of those things as Director Marshall and I have asked you to do? Um, what are you seeing? What are you finding?
SPEAKER_01I think there's two major findings that we really have to aggressively
Death By PowerPoint Problem
SPEAKER_01target. And one, you've already mentioned you walked into essentially a training freeze. That training freeze started somewhere around April of 2024, and it continued until recently. But we have to also recognize that training freeze was on the back of the training freeze that we experienced in COVID. So we are incredibly behind in training. We are looking at the wait list on all of the training courses offered in the Bureau of Prisons. And we believe there's almost 300 different course offerings at MSTC. We also have uh training that happens at Glenco as well. And as you know, introductory to correctional techniques is the training our employees get right off the bat, annual training, et cetera. So we have a lot of training. And unfortunately, the wait list for some of these courses go into the hundreds or even into the thousands. So we're behind. The second real issue that we're finding is that as an agency, for many years, we probably selected the worst training philosophy that exists in learning, which is often referred to as death by PowerPoint. It's ineffective. We know it's ineffective. Estimates range somewhere around 5% of the information in a traditional lecture death by PowerPoint presentation is retained. So think about what that means. You sit in a week class, 40-hour training course. We can expect those individuals to retain about two hours out of that 40-hour week. So we've got to also not only reinvest in training, but we have to think critically about how we train. Because while we have some phenomenal instructors in the Bureau Prisons and we have some excellent courses, if we're going to continue to move forward with a death by PowerPoint approach, it's going to continue to be largely ineffective. And you know, nobody enjoys it.
SPEAKER_00It's not fun. I had asked our team,
Field Feedback And Accountability Gaps
SPEAKER_00the training team, before you got here, hey, how do you feel like we're doing on some of these trainings? I said, Well, we feel like we're doing pretty good. So I pulled five wardens and five associate wardens that had been through the last training. And I told them, you just pick me out five, pick your best ones of each. And I met with them and I just said, All right, if you're getting great training, that's all you got to do, is say great training. But this would be the time to tell the truth if you don't feel like you are. And I'm gonna tell you, their answers not only shocked me, but it really bothered me. Because some of them got really honest and talked about some of the areas that they don't feel like they've been trained in, yet they're being held accountable to be doing finance, budget, all the things that especially wardens have, the responsibilities have, and then to not be trained with it. And then again, we run them through, check the box, okay, training's done. And that's not how it's going to be moving forward. Agree.
SPEAKER_01I would totally agree. You know, training is the backbone of this agency. It has to be. You know, there's a couple of things that training, I think,
Training Shapes Culture And Safety
SPEAKER_01addresses. One, it certainly contributes to the safety and security of our institutions. That's important, right? Good training also shapes our institution culture, right? Good training makes sure that we're doing the right thing, not just legally, but that we're the interventions that we're using at our institutions are actually effective. And so we've got to do much more because training really has a huge impact on everything that we do. Would you believe, for example, we have long, long wait lists uh for CPR instructors or firearms instructors or de-escalation instructors. And so we have yet to really invest in even the trainers who are bringing the training to our institutions. Yeah, I mean, we've been working even on bus. I mean, it's been years, uh, I guess, since a lot of the bus training's been offered. About two years since our last bus class. And we just did an audit.
Critical Instructor Shortages
SPEAKER_01We're about conservatively 100. We need about at least 100 trained certified bus operators just to get us functional. We probably need three to four hundred more trained bus operators to get us functioning well.
SPEAKER_00It's a major backlog. I tell you, I don't know where we'd be without the big, beautiful bill that Trump passed. Uh, Director Marshall and I've taken and said, hey, we're gonna put a big emphasis on training over the next two years, utilizing those resources, even through budget cuts and Congress cutting our budget again. Thanks to that money, we're gonna be able to do that. MSTC is rolling. That's right. We've got trainings happening, we've got those things. Talk about the role of how do we improve training? How do we improve what, you know, what does training look like in the future to Bureau of Prisons? We've got a great video team out there, we've got some other things. What are some of the things that we'll utilize to improve how training is?
SPEAKER_01So, again, as I already mentioned, there's no question we've got to get away from the death by PowerPoint model. You know, training has to be active. It can't be passive. So we're
Funding Opens A Path Forward
SPEAKER_01looking at all kinds of new technologies and strategies. There's some excellent ways that we can use AI and go to a more scenario-based type of training, training that is active and engaging. So people not only remember it, they're able to recall it in those critical moments when training's needed the most. A PowerPoint presentation won't get us there.
SPEAKER_00I was just qualifying uh firearms last week and talking to the gentleman out there, you know, talking about the lack of training, the lack of frequency. And it is very frustrating to me to go out and see and hear people talking about how long it's
Building Active, Scenario Training
SPEAKER_00been. Uh there was, I won't say what institution, but it's very concerning when I'm talking to a captain who who's been in that role for two years and has not been through captains, right? That's right. And uh, and so I'm really glad to see you guys really doing a great job pushing that to make those uh to get those through. How does training on other things relate back to what you were doing before this job? Uh, because several have asked me and they've talked about it, and I said, hey, wellness and training, it these are not two separate things. These are things together. How do you see those correlate?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's correct. They they have to be together. You know, I think in order to really understand the issue, we really have to take a close look at the types of outcomes that we see for people that have chosen corrections as a profession.
Readiness Gaps For Leaders
SPEAKER_01As I mentioned earlier, the outcome data is not great. You know, in corrections, we see people with adverse health effects from the position within two to five years. That's almost two decades before other professions. When we look at other outcomes like the rates of PTSD and major depression, alcoholism, divorce, and the list goes on and on. Um, training and wellness have to go hand in hand from day one of somebody's um employment with the Bureau of Prisons. When we look at suicide, for example, we see astronomically high rates of suicide in the Bureau Prisons. In fact, the agency started collecting numbers of employee deaths by suicide in 1987. And between 1987 and 1996, the agency had 30 employee
Wellness And Training Interlock
SPEAKER_01deaths by suicide, which is way too many. But from 1997 until today, we've had 190 of our employees die by suicide. It's heartbreaking. And we can do more, we have to do more. And you know, one of the things that strikes me about that number, if you go back to 1997, we've unfortunately had four of our employees killed by an inmate. And we spent a lot of time training for that threat. And that threat is real. We have to train. There's no question about it. But how often historically we train for the biggest threat to our safety, which is ourselves, and we don't take care of ourselves. You're almost 50 times more likely to die by suicide than to be killed by an inmate. And so talking
Stark Suicide Data And Risks
SPEAKER_01about it at annual training for 10 or 15 minutes is just grossly inadequate. So our plan is to start investing in our employees from day one, building a resilient workforce that can do the types of work that we do. Because I think you would agree, I don't know that there's a harder profession than corrections. It can certainly be incredibly rewarding. I love what we do. And I'm so happy that I chose this profession. But it's tough. And I tell people when I talk about these issues, I know about burnout. It's not only just professional for me, personal. I've been there, and it's hard to crawl out of. So we've got to give our employees the skills so they can bounce back from adversity because you, as you know, adversity is part of corrections. It will always be there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think it's a job that, well, it's few understand. Very few understand, quick to throw, you know, different criticisms at, but it is a tough job. And it's a very insulated environment, right? Where only those inside of that environment uh understand. We just had the pleasure of working together on
Building A Resilient Workforce
SPEAKER_00a kind of first ever wardens training that we did for a couple of days, uh, different than the past and the typical training we're doing, which we're going to continue to do. I just thought you did an excellent job of how you led that. Seeing these wardens, you know, for the first time ever, interviewed. Now 15 in this group, along with some of our regional directors, and they were ready. I mean, they're they're ready. I'm I'm very excited about them uh hitting their institution. Talk through that training and uh your mindset behind that and what do you feel like was accomplished?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. It was a fantastic two-day training, and it was really focused on the importance of servant leadership. You know, and servant leadership isn't just a nice thing to talk about, it is essential and critical in corrections. Servant leadership brings um it's strategic, it stabilizes the workforce, and it has direct implications on the agency culture. And so by investing in our leaders, I think that we can expect a number of different
Servant Leadership For Wardens
SPEAKER_01great outcomes, whether it is recruitment or retention or changing the culture of an institution, servant leaders who invest in their employees that don't necessarily lead from a title, um, but believe that we work together. I don't work above you. Um people that lead with humility and ethics and compassion, people that listen, those are the people that have a direct impact on our staff. And we need more of it. And it was great to see our new leaders and some of our seasoned leaders really engage in a wide variety of uh activities and training that was focused on who they are as leaders and who they want to be as leaders when they go back to their institutions. I think it was life-changing for a few people.
SPEAKER_00And I would say I just enjoyed the candid conversation. Yeah, everybody kind of just getting real. I don't think that happens enough inside of corrections. There were some real raw, honest conversations. It was. So, Jason, we get called out many times to the front lines. We've seen all the chaos in the news. We've seen that. Our people are sought after. You know, I made a joke not too long ago. They they were asking
De‑Escalation: Past To Future
SPEAKER_00for war on the front lines to to help with uh to protect some of the federal buildings and some of those things. And I said, hey, getting cussed at, getting stuff thrown at you, getting spit at, well, that's Monday uh for the staff that work inside of the BLP. That's right. Uh and I'll tell you, our staff have made us very proud as they went out and represented us out in the field. But we know that inside of this job, they deal with what other agencies right now are dealing with. We deal with that every single day. And I know that we've had some de-escalation training that is done. Uh is something that's very important to us. I think it could be a lot better, I think you would agree. Now to the outside world, they're like, man, you guys are great. So, but again, since our staff have to deal with it every single day, talk about what your plans are with de-escalation, where we're at and where we're going.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. You know, first and foremost, I have many friends that in the agency that are often called on to do that difficult work. And I think they really shine when they need to handle those difficult situations because of their ability to use their words and to de-escalate situations. As you said, it's something we do every day. The Bureau of Prisons has had training focused on communication for decades. But it was the first step act of 2018 that required us to up the amount of de-escalation training that we do. And as a result of that, we now have an eight-hour de-escalation course that is offered to all of our brand new employees. And we continue then to refresh on de-escalation annually for all of our employees. Right now, we're actually in the process of taking a look at that curriculum and we're gonna make substantial investments in it. Again, we're moving away from some of the more PowerPoint-based,
Facing Negativity, Fighting Burnout
SPEAKER_01lecture-based components of that. And we're gonna make it much more interactive. We're gonna really invest in scenario-based training to put people through the types of things that they can anticipate even prior to them ever working with inside of an institution. So we're really excited and we hope to really be leading corrections when it comes to how we de-escalate and how we train people to de-escalate. It's a critical skill, as I know you would agree, for anybody that works in our institutions.
SPEAKER_00I just want to say to you how excited I am about uh you taking this role in training. We know that a lot of different division leaders have inherited uh a mess, uh, years of underfunded, you know, challenges and those things. And it's hard. You got to get the right leaders in the right places in training, just as you do in other places. But I just want to thank you. Thank you for stepping up into that role. Thank you for willing to come onto this. And just, you know, the Facebook warriors will come at you uh as soon as uh we release it. Plenty of people come just look at the comments. Are you ready for those?
SPEAKER_01Yeah,
Commitment To Equip Every Employee
SPEAKER_01I am. And I do keep an eye on the comments, particularly on comments from folks internal. And there's some positivity, but there is a lot of negativity. But I try to reframe it. What I hear is somebody who is angry, who is burned out and disappointed. What we know is when people are burned out, when they're exhausted, what we tend to see is a lot of cynicism and negativity towards the agency. I feel for those people. And I think that we have to think about how do we get them back? How do we bring them back? How do we get them to recommit themselves to the enormous responsibility that comes with being employed by the Bureau Prisons?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you know, somebody asked me, they said, How do you feel when you see those uh responses? And I say, I feel really bad. Yeah, because most of them don't work for the agency anymore. I feel really bad that this career has had that kind of toll on their life because that's what they're living with every day. That's as you look at the negative comments, you sit there and think, that's them every day commenting, commenting, commenting. This is what they have. And of course, I just say comment away, we're gonna keep working on changing things and fire away.
SPEAKER_01This is a very dangerous profession if you don't take care of yourself. You have to. You absolutely have to. And it will bleed into every aspect of your life. But the good news is we can develop a resilient workforce that can do the hard things. We have lots and lots of those employees out there that do it each and every day. And honestly, those are people who are my heroes, and that's why I'm trying to step up and make a difference.
SPEAKER_00Well, thanks to President Trump's big, beautiful bill. Finally, we're gonna be able to make some investment over the next couple of years into training the way that it should be. And I'm just excited that you have the passion and care that you do for the staff. I believe that if we're gonna ask somebody to do a job, we should equip them and train them to do it, period. And I believe you're the person to be able to help make that happen. So thank you for coming on today. I really appreciate it. And I'm excited to see what you come up with and how you revamp that training. I appreciate it. Thank you, Deputy Director. Appreciate it.
