By Kathleen Gray
Detroit Free Press
LANSING — It was day two of 16 weeks of training for 292 potential prison guards Wednesday and Michigan Department of Corrections director Dan Heyns had a simple message for the class.
“Choose your role models carefully,” he said at the training academy near Lansing. “It is not an exaggeration to say the habits you develop early in your career will stick with you. The good habits will serve you well. The bad habits will bring you down.”
The words come at a time when MDOC has come under intense scrutiny over a private food service contract that has caused problems in the prisons, as well as the lingering effects of a $100-million legal judgment against the department in a class action lawsuit by female inmates who were sexually harassed, abused or assaulted while in prison.
The new class of future prison guards is benefiting from a constantly evolving curriculum, which is developed with input from inmates, guards, lawyers and prison officials from around the country.
“We adjust our academy to meet with best practices, and we refine that constantly,” Heyns said. “We’re relentless in trying to find a better way to do that job.”
And the department is looking to hire 3,000 new corrections officers over the next three years to replace the departure of officers retiring at a clip of 70 per month.
“In the 1980s, there was a big hiring surge and those people are hitting retirement age,” Heyns said. “We can’t have too many vacancies in the institutions.”
The department had been relying on community colleges to train potential officers in recent years, but they haven’t been able to graduate the numbers needed to fill the vacancies at MDOC. So the department is embarking on their own training academy for the first time in about 18 months at a cost of $8.4 million. There will be additional training academies beginning on June 8 and June 22 in an effort to hire 1,000 prison guards this year.
For Sarah Pleshakov, 23, of Swartz Creek, day one of training was uncomfortable.
“I used to work in restaurants and I’m used to talking with a lot of people and being more positive,” she said. “Who wouldn’t be scared at first, but as long as you respect, they’ll respect.”
Jake Froehly, 35, of Dundee, loves the discipline and structure offered by the training. A former military policeman in the Air Force, the training is as close as he’ll come to a military lifestyle in the civilian world.
“The first day I got here, we started getting yelled at and I got goose bumps,” he said. “What happens is that everyone starts getting stressed out in the beginning, but we get built into a team.”
When this latest training is done, the graduating guards will get assigned to prisons in the Lower Peninsula at a starting wage of $16.32 per hour, which can increase to $25 per hour over time.
“We didn’t have any trouble filling the slots,” Heyn said. “We offer an opportunity for young people for a good career.”