North American Association of Wardens & Superintendents - NAAWS

10/22/2026

A hard question for wardens: is your deputy ready to run this institution, or just very good at being your deputy?

Those are different things, and the difference shows up the day you leave. A deputy who has spent years running operations while you handled the budget, central office, legislators, and the media may be excellent in the job they have and unprepared for the one you hold.

Closing that gap is the warden's responsibility. Give your deputies and associate wardens real ownership of part of the budget, not just a seat at the budget meeting. When you come back from executive training, share what you learned instead of leaving it in your notebook. Hand them the difficult assignment, stay out of their way, and review it with them afterward, mistakes included.

It also means being honest about aspiration. Not every excellent deputy wants to become a warden, and there is nothing wrong with that. Development should prepare people for the responsibilities they want and are capable of assuming, rather than treating the warden's chair as the only measure of advancement.

Years from now, part of your record as a warden will be the people you prepared to lead.



10/21/2026

10/20/2026

Three months in, you see things the rest of the facility stopped noticing long ago: the procedure that makes no sense, the shortcut everyone takes, the supervisor who explains things well and the one who doesn't. Write down what you notice and ask good questions about it. Fresh eyes are valuable, and they don't last forever.

Three years in, you know how the place works. This is when habits harden, good or bad. It's also when someone should be asking whether you want to supervise, and when you should start learning the parts of the job you can't see yet: scheduling, budgets, investigations, and how decisions get made above you.

Thirty years in, you've seen most things twice. The risk is assuming you've seen everything. The profession keeps changing, and the leaders who stay useful are still reading, still asking, and still willing to learn from someone half their age.

Wherever you are on that timeline, you have something to learn and something to contribute.

10/19/2026

Here's a simple test of whether you are developing the next generation of leaders: could you take two full weeks off without your phone ringing?

One retired warden who led institutions for about two decades admitted that he rarely took real time away, and that his wife finally insisted on a two-week vacation every year. Looking back, he said that if he had been more confident in what he had taught his people, he would have taken more.

That's an honest admission, and it applies to many of us. When a facility can't run for two weeks without the warden, the issue usually isn't workload. Decisions, relationships, and institutional knowledge have stayed concentrated in one office.

Developing people means letting the deputy chair the meeting you usually run, letting the captain take the call from central office, and resisting the urge to step back in when they handle it differently than you would. They will make mistakes, and it's far better that they make them while you're still around to help them learn.

Someone will sit in your chair one day. How ready they are depends on what you do now.

10/16/2026

Today is National Boss's Day. If you lead a correctional facility, here's a better use of it than accepting a card.

Ask three people who work for you what one change would make their job easier. Pick one of those answers and get it fixed before the end of the month.

Bear Bryant had a rule that a lot of wardens have borrowed over the years: when things go well, credit the team, and when they go badly, the responsibility is yours. Your staff figure out quickly which kind of boss they work for.



10/15/2026

A 1,500-bed facility will serve more than 4,500 meals today. It will do the same tomorrow, on Thanksgiving, and during the next ice storm, whether or not the delivery truck shows up on time.

Food service is one of several departments that keep an institution running without much attention. Maintenance gets the call at 2 a.m. when a sally port gate fails or a housing unit loses hot water in January. Laundry crews work in heat most people wouldn't tolerate for an hour. Warehouse and commissary staff keep supplies moving so a shortage never becomes a problem on the unit.

When these departments are working, nobody notices. When they stumble, the whole facility feels it within a shift.

Good wardens know how hot the kitchen gets in August and which maintenance supervisor can tell you the history of every door in the building. This week, walk through those areas and thank the people who work there by name.

10/14/2026

Here's a question worth putting to your staff at the next in-service: If a serious incident happened in this facility in the next six months, what would it be, and where would it happen?

Then stop talking and write down what they say. Your officers and supervisors will give you answers you won't find in an audit report. They know which door gets propped during mainline, which camera has been out since spring, and which post gets collapsed whenever the shift runs short.

The exercise comes from a back-to-basics approach built after a review of serious incidents in a correctional system. Hardware failures were rarely the whole story. Far more often, the causes were people problems: shortcuts, unclear expectations, procedures nobody followed, complacency, and turnover.

Two conditions make it work. Staff need assurance that honestly naming a gap won't get them disciplined, and the warden has to follow up by reporting back on what was accepted, what changed, and what was declined and why. Facilities that used the approach made hundreds of improvements, some as simple as painting directional arrows on the perimeter fence so responding officers headed toward the right zone.

Most of the time, your staff already know the answer. The real question is whether anyone has asked them.

10/13/2026

It's National Case Management Week, and in corrections, a case manager's work has consequences well beyond the fence.

Reentry starts long before release. It starts when a case manager sits down with someone to work out what that person will need the day they walk out: identification, a birth certificate lost years ago, a benefits application, a supply of medication, and a place to sleep that first night. When that work is done well, nobody outside notices. When it isn't, the community inherits the problem on release day.

Case managers also carry classification reviews, program referrals, parole paperwork, and calls from families, usually on caseloads that would surprise anyone outside the profession.

To the case managers and counselors in our facilities: your work is one of the clearest links between what happens inside and public safety outside, and it deserves more recognition than it usually gets.

10/12/2026

Yesterday was Clergy Appreciation Day, and this week we want to recognize a group that rarely comes up in conversations about correctional operations: institutional chaplains.

Chaplains are often the ones who walk onto a unit to tell someone in custody that a parent has died, and then stay while the news sinks in. They coordinate the volunteers who come through the gate every week, handle religious accommodations for many faiths with fairness and consistency, and keep programs running that give people something to work toward.

They look after staff as well. When an institution loses an employee, the chaplain is usually with the family and also on the floor with the shift that still has to keep working.

To the chaplains serving in our facilities, thank you for work that requires conviction and steadiness, often in the same hour! We couldn't do what we do without your support and care.

10/09/2026

Somewhere in another state, a warden has already worked through the problem sitting on your desk right now.

NAAWS exists so correctional leaders don't have to work through these things alone. One phone call to someone who has been there can save you months of trial and error, and the next call might be someone asking for your help. Next June, many of us will continue those conversations in person in Indianapolis.