By Dr. Al Philip-Neri, Ph.D.
I came on for the evening shift ready to work. I had no idea what I was walking into.
The day shift had been managing elevated tension all day. Friction between rival gang factions had been building across the pods since morning. Staff felt it. They adjusted movement, monitored interactions and stayed close. They managed around it for hours.
That night was movie night. Three pods out simultaneously. Rival factions. Same space. Reduced structure. When the movie ended and lockdown began, 10 to 12 members of one gang moved on the opposing faction at once.
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What followed was not a scuffle. It was mass chaos. Furniture being thrown. Fists. Bodies moving in every direction. The instigators, most of them from my pod, were going all out.
The staff went in. The evening shift supervisor was in the mix with us, not watching from a distance. He was restraining people alongside the rest of us, doing what the moment demanded.
Once we had the instigators locked back in their cells, the yelling did not stop. Gang calls echoed off the walls of the cell house. Full chaos, even behind locked doors.
The supervisor walked directly into it. He was not calm. He was the kind of angry that comes from doing this job long enough to know what had just happened and how preventable it was. He made it clear to the instigators still yelling from their cells: if they thought they were that tough, they were welcome to go another round. Right now. With us.
The yelling stopped.
Then we found out this had been brewing all day. Nobody told me. Nobody told him.
We performed flawlessly in the crisis. We should never have been in the crisis.
That is the leadership lesson from that night: not the riot or the response, but the gap between what the day shift knew and what never reached the people responsible for that environment when they walked through the door.
The handoff is a chain
In corrections, shift transition is not a single conversation. It is a chain that runs simultaneously at every level of the facility.
Line staff brief the line staff coming on to their pod. Line staff brief their supervisor before the shift ends. Supervisors brief supervisors. At every link, the outgoing shift is transferring responsibility for a living environment to people who were not in it for the previous eight hours.
When the chain holds, the incoming shift steps into the environment with a complete picture. They know what is elevated. They know what to watch. They are not starting from zero.
When it breaks, the incoming shift walks into a situation that is already further along than anyone told them. They are behind before the first count.
That night, both links broke simultaneously. The day shift floor staff did not tell me what they had been managing all day on my pod. The day shift supervisor did not tell the evening shift supervisor. The intelligence existed. The chain did not hold.
We walked into a riot that had been building for hours.
What never makes it into the report
In corrections, the most valuable intelligence is almost never in a report.
It is the pod that feels different without anything specific having happened yet. The inmate who has been unusually quiet for two days after being loud all week. The faction that stopped posturing and started moving with discipline. The refusal of movement explained away as attitude rather than read as a signal. The officer who has run that unit for four years and can feel the temperature of the room the moment they walk in.
That intelligence lives in the instincts of experienced staff. It is real and often highly accurate, yet it almost never gets captured in formal documentation because nothing reportable has occurred yet.
The most dangerous intelligence in a correctional facility is the kind that exists only in the heads of the staff who felt it. It goes home with them at the end of the shift.
Why the chain breaks
The failure that night was not unusual. It happens in correctional facilities across the country for the same predictable reasons.
- Lack of standards. There is no defined expectation for what gets communicated at shift change. Without a standard, every officer decides for themselves what is worth saying. What one person considers important, another considers routine. The handoff becomes whatever the outgoing staff feels like sharing on their way out the door.
- End-of-shift fatigue. Staff are focused on going home. Communicating a developing situation that has not yet become an incident takes energy that competes directly with that relief. The abbreviated handoff becomes the norm. The intelligence that required hours of active management all shift gets reduced to a few words or nothing at all.
- Perception. Staff observe the same environment and interpret it differently. A veteran reads elevated tension as a warning. A less experienced officer sees the same behavior and assumes it is normal. Without a shared standard for what constitutes a risk worth communicating, the observation stays subjective. It never becomes information.
Every link in that chain depends on what starts at the floor. If the intelligence does not move there first, nothing above it has anything real to transfer.
The difference between a report and intelligence
A report documents what occurred. It is written after the threshold is crossed. By definition, it captures what the facility failed to prevent.
Intelligence is what exists before the threshold is crossed. It is the observation that has not yet become an event, the tension that has not yet become a fight, or the read an experienced officer is carrying in real time.
The difference between a facility that prevents incidents and one that responds to them is whether that pre-incident intelligence moves through the chain or stays with the individual who generated it.
Intelligence that stays with one person is really just a private observation. Intelligence that moves through a system is what keeps a facility ahead of what is building inside it.
The system and the question
Most facilities already have the intelligence. What they do not have is the system to move it.
The standard is three questions asked at every link in the chain before anyone leaves the facility:
- What changed today?
- Who or what group are we watching tonight and why?
- What shifts in behavior did you observe on your shift?
That last question is the one that matters most because it focuses on behavioral shifts rather than incidents or completed events.
The inmate who got a bad phone call and has been quiet ever since. The one whose demeanor changed after a visit. The one whose significant other just told them they are leaving. The one who stopped eating. The one who has been unusually compliant when they are normally difficult.
Those are not reportable events. They are early warning signals.
Line staff to line staff. Line staff to their supervisor. Supervisor to supervisor. The same three questions at every level. Every link in the chain accountable to the same standard before the shift ends.
That night, the standard did not exist.
The breakdown never starts where leaders think it starts. It starts in the signals nobody communicated, the tension nobody named, the intelligence everybody had and nobody transferred.
The intelligence already exists. The question is what happens to it at shift change.
What information is walking out the door at the end of every shift because no system exists to capture it?
About the author
Dr. Al Philip-Neri, Ph.D., spent more than a decade in the Colorado Division of Youth Corrections and Colorado Department of Corrections, serving as a Correctional Officer I, II and III, certified use-of-force instructor, and member of the Colorado DOC Statewide Special Operations Response Team. He also served within the Youthful Offender System, Colorado’s pioneering correctional program for violent juvenile offenders sentenced as adults.
Following his corrections career, Dr. Al led Jefferson County’s post-Columbine multi-agency school violence response initiative, coordinating law enforcement, fire service and school district partners in the development of active violence response and use-of-force protocols. He later returned to corrections as director of a statewide juvenile correctional facility.
Dr. Al earned his doctorate in Performance Psychology and is the founder of Cohesion HQ, a performance advisory firm that helps leaders build organizations that align, sharpen, and execute. He is the author of “The Execution Advantage: How Leaders Build Organizations That Drive Results.”