Dealing with People on the Very Worst Day of their Life: Tara Wildes

In this episode, Chris and Alison talk to Tara Wildes, the Director of the Corrections Division of the St. John's County Sheriff's Department.  Director Wildes was also the director of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office Department of Corrections - the first woman to ever run that corrections system where she supervised over 800 employees.  We talk about the challenges of running a county jail, the intersection of mental illness and the criminal justice system, crimes committed in jail, and whether people can be reformed though imprisonment.

These conversations are not appropriate for children. People with their own traumatic histories should be aware that we discuss violent crimes, exploitation, sexual trauma, child abuse, and incarceration.

Transcript

Wildes_Transcript.mp3

Alison DeBelder [00:00:04] This is trauma injustice, this is a podcast about the ways that people confront and manage trauma in the justice system. These conversations touch on seriously troubling topics. This podcast is not appropriate for children. People with their own traumatic histories should be aware that we discuss violent crimes, exploitation, sexual trauma, child abuse and incarceration. 

Chris Moser [00:00:28] I'm Chris Moser 

Alison DeBelder [00:00:30] and I'm Alison DeBelder. Our guest today is Tara Wildes director. Wild's got her bachelor's degree from UNEF. She's taught at Florida Community College at Jacksonville and the University of Florida. She's been certified by the state as an instructor in general, criminal justice topics and she's certified in human diversity and firearms with the Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission. She started out as a reserve officer volunteering with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, and in 1985, she graduated from the police academy and joined Jayco director. Wild's was appointed to director of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office Department of Corrections in 2013. She was the first woman to run the sheriff's office corrections system. In that capacity, she was responsible for supervising over 800 employees. She retired from the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office after more than 30 years of service. During that time, she chaired the Mental Health Coalition. She served on the Mayor's Commission on the Status of Women and the Metropolitan Jacksonville Area HIV Health Services Planning Council. She's belonged to the Fraternal Order of Police, the American Correctional Association, the Rotary Club of South Jacksonville and the American Jail Association. She served on the boards of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Jacksonville Disability Rights, Florida Prisoners of Christ Stop TB USA. She is currently the director of the Corrections Division for the St.. Johns County Sheriff's Office. Welcome, Director Wild's. Thank you for being here. 

Tara Wildes [00:02:09] Thank you. I'm honored to be able to talk to you. 

Alison DeBelder [00:02:12] I found that you had served on disability rights Florida and I just recently joined an advisory board for them. 

Tara Wildes [00:02:21] Well, that's awesome. They are a great group to work with. You're really going to enjoy that work. I was on that board for a long time because they couldn't find anybody to replace me who would represent the rights of incarcerated persons. That was the role I served there. 

Alison DeBelder [00:02:35] Wow. So do they have a chair that specifically for that role 

Tara Wildes [00:02:40] they do on their overall board? They have it pretty well spelled out. You know, what the criteria are for their different members, and it is primarily a lawyer board. There are very few nonlawyer members, but I was one of the nonlawyer members again because I wanted somebody that had either jail or prison experience or not necessarily worked experience. It could be lived experience as well. Right. And they also wanted a nexus to disability in your family. And I have some serious mental illness in my family, as well as a brother who was quadriplegic, who recently passed away. 

Alison DeBelder [00:03:11] I'm sorry to hear that. 

Tara Wildes [00:03:12] Well, thank you. But it's having that family connection, I think also helped me tie in the criminal justice and the disability related issues they deal with. 

Alison DeBelder [00:03:21] Can you tell us who the folks are and their diagnosis in your family? 

Tara Wildes [00:03:25] Certainly. My sister has severe bipolar disorder. She's had a lots of ups and downs in her life, but she is literally doing very living very well right now with her illness. She is a nurse in a prison in Georgia and she is not ashamed of the illness. I have her permission to talk about it. She's a great advocate for living well with mental illness. 

Alison DeBelder [00:03:45] That's amazing. You have a lot of law enforcement in your family, right? Did I read that your dad and your grandfather were both law enforcement officers and your son is a CEO? 

Tara Wildes [00:03:57] Yes, that's correct. And I've got I've got extended relatives and ancestors that have been in law enforcement and corrections. Going way back at genealogy is kind of a fun hobby of mine. And I keep popping up and finding people that have a connection with the criminal justice system. So I think I can truly say it probably is about Billard 

Alison DeBelder [00:04:14] before we get into the meat of things. I thought that it might be helpful for our listeners to know the difference between a jail and a prison. Would you mind explaining that? 

Tara Wildes [00:04:27] Yes, absolutely. A prison is where you go when you've been sentenced to more than a year. If you have been tried for a crime or you've played out to a crime, you have been convicted and you are going to serve more than a year's worth of time. A jail is your first stop in that process. And a jail takes everybody at county jail, takes everybody that's arrested in that county. And you have everybody from the most minor misdemeanor trespassing to people that will eventually go to death row. So it's a real mixed bag of what you get. And even though you think, oh, well, people don't stay in jail for more than a year. I mean, when I left the Jacksonville system, homicide suspects were spending an average of four years in jail before they were either eventually sentenced, exonerated of whatever the disposition of their case was. So you may end up with people sometimes for four to five years in jail. So it's just a really mixed bag. But that's the basic difference between jails and prisons. 

Alison DeBelder [00:05:21] The folks that are in jail, obviously, people acclimate after they've been there for a while. But you constantly have an influx of people who have just been arrested, too. So you have people who are all of a sudden going without medication of whatever kind or people who are addicted to drugs or alcohol who all of a sudden don't have their drugs and alcohol. You have people separated from their family and they have not gotten used to that, or they're looking at their husbands and wives, leaving them all of a sudden as a result of them being in jail. So I feel like there's a lot of really intense stress, not that there isn't in prisons, but that it's of a different quality in the jail. Do you think that's fair to say? 

Tara Wildes [00:06:06] Absolutely. It's a big turn. And you're dealing with people on the very worst day of their life in most cases. Now there's folks who come back and I guess there are individuals who I think get used to it. We have some chronic misdemeanors that kind of cycle through the system all the time. For most people, you're dealing with them in crisis. When they come in, it's literally the worst day in their life, no matter what you've done, which is bad enough when you consider the crime, the fact that you've lost your freedom, you can't go to the refrigerator and get a cold drink when you want to. You're using the bathroom in front of other people. You're taking a shower in front of other people. That's completely dehumanizing and discombobulating for you as a person. You're just dealing with people and their trauma 24/7 when you work in a jail system. 

Alison DeBelder [00:06:47] Can you tell us what your job is all about right now? What does it mean to be the director of the corrections division in St. John's County? 

Tara Wildes [00:06:56] I think probably the easiest way to describe it to people who aren't familiar with the correctional system is to kind of think of me as the mayor of a small city because I am supplying or responsible for supplying everything people need while they're here. We're responsible for their care, their custody and their control. People always think about the custody and control part and they tend to forget about the care. I'm responsible for making sure that they get the appropriate medical care. That's commiserate with what's available in the community. I'm responsible for making sure that they get nutritionally appropriate meals. I'm responsible for making sure that they have opportunities to improve themselves, having access to their attorneys, have an access to educational programs, setting up their visitation, and in the meantime, basically keeping them locked in because we're holding them, because the courts have said these people present a risk to society if they're out. So I've got the responsibility of making sure that they stay in a secure environment. 

Chris Moser [00:07:51] I'm really excited that you're in St. John's County because my students are actually going to get to do a jail tour in January and spend a day with the sheriff's office. Great. And whether are students that want to go to law school or go into law enforcement, the criminology program, I think it's really eye opening for everybody to get that experience. And so I'm just so grateful you're here. I did have a question about the risk to society and the people that are incarcerated in Duvall and in St. John's. In your experience, do you have a rough estimate of how many people just simply can't make the bail to get out of jail? 

Tara Wildes [00:08:33] It's apples and oranges when you compare those two counties, because the Fourth Judicial Circuit in the Seventh Judicial Circuit have different ways of looking at their bonds and their bond schedule, I will say a larger percentage of people in St. John's County are able to bond out or apparently have the means to be able to. In Duval. That was something that honestly I dealt with my entire career with individuals that could not bond out despite having very low bonds. I feel like when you compare and we had done several comparisons over the years looking at the bond schedules in the six major metropolitan areas in the state of Florida. And Duval's is one of the most restrictive in that manner. In other words, it costs more money to get out of jail in Duval County than it does in almost any other jurisdiction in the state. 

Chris Moser [00:09:20] I mean, it certainly appears that way to me. You know, I was a public defender up in Duval, and I take a couple of private cases in St. John's County. And just by sheer observation, it seems like the more serious cases have, the more appropriate bonds and that there are less people incarcerated. 

Tara Wildes [00:09:42] Now, one of the good things Duval does do is they have a really robust pretrial services system that for the most part, a lot of individuals get regard to that and it gives them some pretrial supervision. And I think some of the judiciary there is more comfortable with people having that pretrial supervision if they're not in jail. And the last time I don't know what the numbers are right now, but I know there were upwards of over five hundred people that would otherwise be incarcerated that were on that pretrial supervision program, which is a very good process. I'm just of the opinion that if a person is not a risk to public safety, if they're not presenting a danger, then the necessity of keeping them locked up is diminished. You know, when I talk to classes and things like that, I always say one thing people don't think about in the public. You think about jail as being locked up in jail is a punishment. That initial lock up is simply for that control and to make sure that people aren't being harmed. The punishment part comes when the conviction and the sentence is handed out. So in the meantime, if we're keeping people in pretrial who are not a danger, who are we keeping them in with? We're keeping them in with other people who have those same aberrant behaviors that they have. Jail is like high school for criminals, and prison is like university for criminals. If you graduate from jail to prison, then you're going to move further along in your criminal career because all your hanging out with at that point in time are other criminals. 

Chris Moser [00:11:05] I remember saying that in county court, right, have repeat clients, and then I was promoted to felony and they would say, oh, you graduated. I guess you did too. We're both here now. 

Tara Wildes [00:11:17] You know, think about your parents. I'm sure they sit there and they say, oh, well, you know, the people you hang out with are the ones that are going to influence you and they try to keep you from running with the wrong crowd and that kind of thing. And then the system deliberately takes people and puts them in the wrong crowd and makes you stay there with them. 

Alison DeBelder [00:11:31] If there was anything that you wished people knew about jail, what would it be? 

Tara Wildes [00:11:39] Jail will not fix you if you have a problem. Going to jail is not going to fix that problem. Now, that said, a lot of people do go to jail one time and the experience is so traumatic or so upsetting that they decide, oh, this is not for me and I'm not going to do these things again. That does happen. But for the most part, just the fact of being locked up and going to jail isn't going to fix people. And I think there is a belief out there in the public that if we take them off the street and we get them locked up for a day or two and we teach them a lesson, then they're not going to do that again. And that's just not the way people work. 

Alison DeBelder [00:12:13] I know that the jails in Jacksonville were one of the biggest, if not the biggest providers of mental health services in the area, and you have demonstrated a lot of concern and dedicated a lot of your time to mental health issues in the community, like we started talking about at the beginning of the show. Do you think that care came from your personal experience with your sister, or where did that come from? 

Tara Wildes [00:12:46] Well, I think that yes, I will say it started with my own personal life experiences, but it grew as I worked in the system and I saw the impact, that lack of mental health care, lack of availability of mental health care in the community has on the entire criminal justice system. If we were serious as a society about really making an impact on crime and trying to be focused in our prevention efforts, if we had mental health and substance abuse care immediately accessible and universally available to everyone, we would have a huge impact on the deep end services, on what we're paying for prisons and jails and people to wear uniforms like me. If we could get to people earlier on, even people with very serious mental illness. The evidence shows that if you have intervention early on after that first psychotic episode, you get deeply involved and make sure they're on the right kind of medication and things like that. You can stop that cascade of things that happens that may end up with somebody doing an act that puts them in prison or commits them to the state hospital. The earlier you get in there, the quicker you do that intervention, the better off the whole system is going to be. And definitely that person and their family. 

Alison DeBelder [00:13:56] And when people are incarcerated who have poorly controlled, serious mental illness, it necessarily must put the other folks who are locked up and your employees, the corrections officers, in harms way. 

Tara Wildes [00:14:14] Yes, absolutely it does. You had mentioned earlier about, you know, when people come in, they may not be on their medications. They may not tell us about their medications. A lot of times people will come in who are managing their illness well on the outside. But because there's a stigma related to mental illness, they don't tell us that they're on that kind of medication or and a lot of cases, most jails are they're medical providers or contracted medical service providers to a contract company that provides both medical and mental health care. A lot of them are on formularies. So the kind of medication you may be on on the street may not be the same kind of medication that they give you when you come inside the correctional system. So you'll have people decompensate and start acting out with other behaviors. And you're right, it puts everyone at risk when that happens. Now, individuals with mental illness are inherently more dangerous than anybody else. But if a person is experiencing a psychotic break or having an episode where they don't know where they're at and they're not recognizing the consequences of their actions, that can be really serious. 

Alison DeBelder [00:15:13] What kinds of policy shifts did you implement or try to implement over your career, around the care of people who are living with mental illness, who are arrested and are in the jail? 

Tara Wildes [00:15:29] Now, I didn't do it alone, I had a lot of help from the various sheriffs that I work for who were all big mental health advocates, starting with Nat Glover, he's probably pushed the first push and started a mental health task force that was specific to criminal justice issues. And then the sheriffs that followed him, both John Rutherford and Mike Williams, have continued that push. A couple of the things that we did was build that connection between the community, mental health care and the criminal justice portion of mental health care in Jacksonville. We had a person from the Mental Health Resource Center who actually works inside the facility and make sure that when clients come in that they're not disconnected from services while they're in, that when they get out, they are reconnected with services. We've created a tiered housing system that housed people in a different way based on their behaviors and their diagnosis. There's a lot of folks that just think we've got a mental health diagnosis. Then you may you may need to be isolated or segregated from the general population. We also know that that's not good for your mental health to be isolated as well. So we had a system where you would, based on your behaviors, would be able to move from isolation to less restrictive to hopefully back the general population, because that's the least restrictive environment. But we also did something called an open mental health dorm where individuals who could not quite cope with general population, but they could cope with other individuals with similar circumstances. And we had some housing like that creating that tiered housing system and having mental health counselors inside the facility who understands how that work and kind of manages the movement of people to keep them in the best environment you can. Look, jail's not a therapeutic environment. Like I said, it's not there. We're not going to make anybody better. But we want to try to keep them from getting worse for sure while we have them. 

Alison DeBelder [00:17:12] It seems to me that that kind of approach, a gentle, kind approach, might be hard for a lot of women, especially women who are breaking ground, who are taking on a role that's never been chartered by a woman before, might be reluctant to take on rape because I imagine women in law enforcement have to prove that they are tough, that they're as tough, that they're as capable as men, and that they might therefore be reluctant to take on kind of that gentle tone which you've had. 

Tara Wildes [00:17:51] Well, I think if you ask some of my employees, they were so kind and gentle all the time for sure. But and some of the inmates I've dealt with over the years, too, I try to be equal opportunity in the way I deal with people. I try to be fair. I try to be a direct communicator. And when you talk about kindness, I agree. I have compassion for people. I have empathy for people, but not necessarily sympathy. And I think there's a difference. You can have compassion and not be weak. You know, it's not a sign of weakness. You can show emotion and not be weak. I always look at this way. If other people think I'm weak because I'm crying, that's their problem. That's not mine. I'm going to show emotion. I'm going to try to communicate with you directly. We're going to have differences of opinion. That's going to be OK. I have had some really exciting differences of opinions over my career with some of the individuals that I've worked with. And there are people who think that my approach is more soft, so to speak, than they would do. But the approach I have is based on what works. If I do something and it works, then I'm going to keep doing that thing. If I do something and it doesn't work, then I'm not going to do that thing again in most cases. 

Chris Moser [00:19:00] I think it's also an individual approach where you're not just looking at somebody D.C. number or case number, but you actually are looking at the specific person and their individual needs in the moment. Is that part of it? 

Tara Wildes [00:19:15] That is absolutely the key. And I think that is the key to doing effective criminal justice and doing effective justice, period, is to look at people as individuals. When you have so many people moving through and you're dealing with hundreds of people every day, then it's really easy to look at it as a system and a turn. And you just keep moving along and you keep going and people become processes and not people. But again, if you want to make the impact, if you want to make a change in behavior, then you have to assess that person as an individual and do the things that works for them as an individual. Every single criminal justice or correctional related program that works, that's the one thing that it says every single time, is you have to assess and determine what that individual's needs are. There is no one size fits all. 

Chris Moser [00:20:00] I'm thinking about capacity then does that necessarily mean that some of these county jails should be smaller? And if so, what's the ideal staffing and capacity for a facility that is safe for the inmates and for the corrections officers that work there? 

Tara Wildes [00:20:19] That is a super hard question to answer because it is different in every single jurisdiction when they're 67 counties in the state and there's 67 different ways of looking at jails in the state. Every sheriff is different. Every sheriff has a different approach to it. I think things that we're doing that are good is we are accrediting systems. Florida has a very robust state accreditation system. We have something called Florida model jail standards that every county jail has to meet those standards. If not, there's some punitive things that happen, you know, not necessarily monetarily, but there's issues and it can come up in litigation if you're not maintaining your accreditation and you're not maintaining your inspections. And that can hurt you when there's litigation for civil rights issues and things like that. 

Chris Moser [00:21:02] I guess I was thinking maybe in terms of a percentage of population, but what your answer just reminded me of our new sheriff, Rob Hardwick, I believe, and you would know better than me when he was in charge of the St. Augustine Beach police. I believe one of his legacies or one of the action items that he took was to get accreditation right. And recognition and accountability in overseeing the actions of the police. Can you talk a little bit about that? And did that play into your decision to come out of retirement to take this new position on you? 

Tara Wildes [00:21:44] Absolutely. When I talked to the sheriff, his philosophy and my philosophy are very similar. We want to try to make the community a better place. We want to work with the people we have while we have them to provide them with opportunities to improve themselves when they get out. We don't want to warehouse people. He started his career in corrections and he gets it. And a lot of and again, I'm not throwing a rock or criticizing other facilities, but a lot of times if you have not been in the correctional system and you don't know the intricacies of it, it's really hard to say what would work and what doesn't work and where you would like that system to go. He having that personal experience there, he understands not just the opportunities for the inmates, but he understands the job of the officers. I have to work here, too, and the things that they have to see and deal with on a daily basis and all the individuals that they have to work with. He is in the jail himself, I would say, once a week, if not more. And that is very unusual for a sheriff, because most sheriffs are very uncomfortable for whatever reason in jail environments or simply don't have the time or don't make the time to go into the into the correctional environment. So that's something that I appreciate personally. When we had our initial conversation and I told him, no, I'm not doing this now, I'm not doing this. I'm a very happy retired person and he wore me down. 

Alison DeBelder [00:23:01] What is he doing when he's in in the jail? 

Tara Wildes [00:23:04] He does a lot of management by walking around and he talks to the deputies. But he also talked to the medical staff. He goes into the blocks and he talks to the inmates. He goes and walks the infirmary and talks to the individuals that are in there that are on isolation or suicide watch. He knows most of our more problematic inmates by name. It makes my job so much easier to have somebody that's involved and basically has my back when it comes to dealing with the things that we have to work with in the jail. 

Alison DeBelder [00:23:33] What's the education of corrections officers today? 

Tara Wildes [00:23:38] Well, in most places, let's just talk about entry level, entry level, where you have to have a high school diploma or a GED that's entry level for corrections in the state by the Criminal Justice Standards Training Commission in St. Johns County. I would say I think we're super blessed with that. I think we've probably got the highest educated correctional staff. I don't know of any county that's got anything better than what we have. I've got one guy who's a PhD candidate right now. I have no numbers of master's degrees. I mean, education has been an emphasis in this county and I think that's paid off. We don't have a lot of the issues with personnel that other counties have to deal with. I think the education definitely helps a lot in just overall being able to cope with the system and the people that we work with. 

Alison DeBelder [00:24:28] And we're saying corrections officers for our listeners, I think a lot of people think of a guard, a jail guard, a prison guard, and that is a term that isn't favored. Right. That's not the preferred nomenclature, but that's probably what people have in mind. The correct term is a corrections officer. 

Tara Wildes [00:24:47] Well, like I said, words have power early. You know, they do. And to be a correctional officer in the state of Florida, you have to go to a certification process. You have to take classes that are college level classes that you in a number of hours, you get your correctional certification. The correctional certification is different from the law enforcement certification. And then there's people who have both law enforcement and correctional certifications. You could take what they call a crossover class and pick up the pieces that you missed from the other one. So in my case, I'm both correctional and law enforcement certified, and that is a benefit in that it does help you understand both of those disciplines because there's a lot of bleed over, cross over, so to speak. But there's also a lot of differences between those two professions. And the same said, there's a lot of differences between being a jail, a correctional officer in a jail and being a correctional officer in a prison setting. The environments are very different. 

Alison DeBelder [00:25:39] I want to ask you about some specific experiences with trauma in your career as a supervisor of these huge corrections divisions. You have had rapes that have taken place, both inmates being raped and staff, is that right? Yes. You've had people killed. Yes. You've had people commit suicide. Yes, that's not something that a whole lot of people can say about their job, that those things come within their purview. I guess I'd like to know how those things impacted you and then also how you supervise people who are exposed to those things. 

Tara Wildes [00:26:30] Now, I can tell you this, nobody can deal with it by themselves if you don't have a good support system in a good way to deal with it, it's going to come out. It's going to come out through substance abuse. It's going to come out through rage behaviors. It's going to come out in some kind of way is you have to be able to cope with the things that you see. We're fortunate here that we have a great not just to employee ERP system, but we also have internal individuals from chaplains to other individuals to help deal with our mental health on the job, whether it's crisis intervention or peer support. There's a whole system. If you need the help, you can get it. But a lot of people are still reluctant to ask for and to seek that help. It's funny, I had a change my phone number back when we had house phones and I had changed my phone number. And I guess the phone company had reissued my personal my house phone number to somebody else. Probably a year after that, somebody called me and said, hey, you know, I called your old number and the person cussed me out. And I said, Huh? So I called him and I said, Hey, this is I'm the person who used to have the number. I am so sorry if people are still calling you. And they said, I don't know what you do, lady, but they're calling me about people dying and people being raped. And I can't handle this anymore. And I said, oh, well, I said, I am so, so sorry. I said, here's my number. You know, if somebody calls you, please feel free to give it out. Everybody else that they as you know, they but I just and I thought, man, I'm traumatizing somebody vicariously without even knowing it through my phone number. But it it is it that's the one thing when you talked about being the mayor of a small city or whatever, it's a very dysfunctional city and there's a lot of very sick people in it. And there are people with needs more than and not just the inmates that like you said, the mental health of the personnel is a stressful job. And I've had I've had close to as many staff members commit suicide as I have inmates. 

Alison DeBelder [00:28:26] And that's it's not right. 

Tara Wildes [00:28:28] Yeah. And besides suicides, I've had personnel who've developed schizophrenia and I've been completely your a uniformed officer one day and a month from now, you're being committed to the state system. I mean, everything that can happen in the real world happens in the microcosm of jail, too. So it is it's a constant. 

Alison DeBelder [00:28:49] I know you mentioned the AP, the employee assistance program. Was there anything in place for your corrections folks where they were mandated to avail themselves of some of the support stuff that's in place? 

Tara Wildes [00:29:03] Yes, know immediately following a critical incident, we would usually have a mandatory meeting with no brass, none of none of the big shots or anything, but with somebody with a mental health background, sometimes it was peers, sometimes it was AP type person, so they could at least have that initial download and talk. I think there is value in that. I think there's also value in having several paths that people can take and they can take the path that works for them. And that's why, you know, having an app, having an in-house wellness program, having the peer support, having the chaplaincy, having those different paths that people can take as long as all those paths understand when somebody gets critical that you may have to step it up to that next level is so much better than it used to be. I can tell you from the days when I first started, it was suck it up, buttercup. It was like, oh, you saw something terrible. You just don't talk about that anymore. And if you do talk about it, then you're going to be ostracized and looked at as being dysfunctional yourself. 

Alison DeBelder [00:30:05] Are there any specific incidents that you've witnessed that stay with you in trouble, you. 

Tara Wildes [00:30:13] There's a lot there's a lot of them that stay with me and troubled me, and it's not that I could have done anything to change the trajectory of it. That's not what troubles me. But but what troubles me more is to see the ripple effect of what happens from a suicide or from somebody losing a family member. Can you think about how terrible that is, that somebody is already in jail and then they die in jail, especially if it's somebody's parent? So over the years, with the litigation that comes after those deaths and you dig into it so deeply and you look at all the potential reasons and all those kind of things, and then you do get to know their family and you see their children and those kind of things. You wish you could do something to make that not happen again so that nobody has to go through that kind of stuff. That's probably the biggest driver for me is if there's something I can do that prevents that from recurring for anybody else, then I feel like it's my obligation to try to do that. 

Chris Moser [00:31:11] I have a question about women inmates, and I was wondering if you ever experienced a woman giving birth in the jail and if that was traumatizing for you. And then we see so much about the lack of sanitary napkins in prison and some litigation there. Have you ever seen someone give birth in the county jail? 

Tara Wildes [00:31:39] I have seen people have miscarriages, I haven't seen anybody actually give a viable birth, I have one of the first things I did when I was a baby c0 out of the old prison farm was right in the back of an ambulance with a woman who was about to give birth. But luckily we made it to the hospital. It was always getting kind of worried that the baby involved. But no, she she made it to the hospital. 

Alison DeBelder [00:31:59] Did they check? Was she shackled? Did they shackle women when they were giving birth 

Tara Wildes [00:32:03] in those days? Yes, she was. She was. 

Alison DeBelder [00:32:07] What does that look like? One wrist to the bed or hands? 

Tara Wildes [00:32:11] She was in the back of the ambulance. And what it looked like it you had it was regular handcuffs. That was we didn't have what we call the one piece restraints today where we have the handcuffs that are attached with a chain to the leg shackles. You had individual handcuffs, an individual leg shackles. This is back in the 80s. I had to get specific permission from my sergeant to take the shackles off her legs when we arrived at the hospital so that she could. Yeah, I know. It's shocking, shocking. But, yes, that's that's the way things were. 

Alison DeBelder [00:32:41] What's the policy now with your pregnant women? 

Tara Wildes [00:32:44] The policy now? We can we comply. We comply with Florida law, which is which says that if you don't shackle people that are pregnant, you don't handcuff them unless there is some exigent situation that requires you to. I can't think over the course of my career where I have ever dealt with a pregnant female, where there would be an exigent situation for me to do that. 

Chris Moser [00:33:07] Can you talk a little bit about the miscarriage, was it one particular event that came to mind or was that something that happened more often in your experience? Because it probably happened without your knowledge to lots of times, I imagine. 

Tara Wildes [00:33:24] Yeah, it would. You know, somebody would complain of bleeding or whatever, and then we would take them to medical and then things would happen there. But there was one in particular that I can remember that happened in one of the dorms in Jacksonville where the individual delivered a fetus that looked like it potentially could have been viable, you know, and she put the baby in the sink. And it was just just that was it was just. Yeah, you know, and I think it freaked us all out, you know, all of us that went in and responded to that, you know, it was just a I don't know. I can't I still can't describe it. You wish you could have been there to do something different. And the inmate was mentally ill and she was so blasé about it like it wasn't anything at all. And it just it was a very difficult situation for all of us to deal with. And we did have some crisis counseling that followed that up for some of those individuals that were involved in that. 

Chris Moser [00:34:17] I imagine, my gosh, that sounds just horrific to me, that image in my head sounds about as bad as the other instances that you described, because that's not something that you probably anticipate in the same way as a potential traumatic event to witness or assist in. 

Tara Wildes [00:34:41] No people hanging themselves, jumping off the upper tier, you know, doing those kind of things or attacking each other with Shank's, you know, all the blood and all that kind of stuff, I'm not making light of any of that. But it's you see enough of it. You're like, OK, but that was different. That was that was a different situation. 

Chris Moser [00:34:59] What's your view on visitation, do you think that allowing visitation in a more generous way helps maintain the safety of the population, or do you think there is a correlation there between that in any way, shape or form, whether it's in person or on Polycom? Is that what you guys used to? 

Tara Wildes [00:35:22] We got something called home life here. Yeah, but it's a video visitation of actually changed my opinion on that. First of all, as far as visitation goes, the more contact people can have with their support systems, with their positive support systems, with their families, the better an outcome that individuals going to have. And that means whether they eventually get out of jail or go to prison or whatever, having that exterior support system is incredibly important for anyone to do well in whatever setting they're in. You need other people who care about you and you need to maintain those relationships and those connections. That being said, there are problems in jails with in-person visitation because of the pressure that people put on visitors to basically muling contraband and everything. You know, stuff's going to get in. That's what I always say. There is no contraband free jail. They're going to figure out a way to get it in. It's just that's just the nature. Again, that's one of the challenges. That's one of the I consider it a fun thing if you can figure it out and outthink each other. But the thing that I have really come to like about the video visitation is if people now but you can do Web based and people can do it from their home and you can see their children, they can see their house, they can see their dogs and cats, you know, things that you couldn't see when you were having an in-person visitation. And also with the pandemic, I think we've realized that there's so much more we can do with the technology to allow people to maintain those kind of contacts that we have it that we haven't considered before. So I think that's one of the positive byproducts of the pandemic and that goes for court hearings and things like that as well. And having access to clients in the facility instead of attorneys having to come in and investigators having to come in and go through our admittedly horrendous system to be able to get in and out, you know, you can do it by Zoome or do it by home. Leave now. And I will say that there's not advantages to face to face. There's times when you absolutely have to do it. But using the technology is very good in this regard, too. And if you can't access video visitation, I know another kind of hot topic right now is male correspondents in jails and prisons. I've been following what's happening with the state of Florida, Dossi right now with the mail. And I understand the process they're going through. And we've already been through that same process. Our mail goes often, is scanned and comes back and it's become a necessity because of the amount of drugs that are infused into the paper. And I think people don't realize how much of that there is. You can come in sometimes and smell, you know, the not not here, not in this facility, but in other facilities I've been. And you can actually smell the drugs burning in the cells when you walk in because they're basically smoking or burning their mail is so difficult to detect. There's not a lot of good systems out there to detect that kind of contraband. One of the most, I guess I hate to say popular, but what's been happening and my sister even tells me from the prison she works in, in Georgia, they call it stripping or roach strips. They spray bug spray, wasp spray or roach spray onto them. They infuse that into the mail and then they smoke those strips. And it creates a lot of people, some some pretty serious psychosis and a lot of other really bad effects. I just don't seem like the kind of high I'd want to have. But when you're in, you'll do things like that because you need some kind of relief from the monotony. That's just what people do. 

Chris Moser [00:38:41] I was just kind of curious about the most creative thing, whether it was an escape attempt or smuggling of a thing. The roach spray I was aware of. And then when I did a little bit of death row work, inmates would make kind of their own version of alcohol with orange juice. And there was a lot of creativity there. If you think of anything, just let us know 

Tara Wildes [00:39:07] back when I could smell. And it's not a result of covid. I've got some nose blindness, I think just from working in correctional facilities for a long time. There's certain smells like 

Alison DeBelder [00:39:15] that could really be a blessing. 

Tara Wildes [00:39:18] It is. It is. I can't smell certain smells and I don't miss them. It's good, you know, and a lot of times I can't I can't smell jail. When people walk into the jail here, I'll ask them, say, hey, what does it smell like to tell you what it feels like? I guess they all think, I know I can't smell jail anymore. So tell me whether it's a good smell or a bad smell. So I get get a lot of interesting feedback that way. But I used to Kuhn and I still can smell hootch or bood or whatever they're calling it this week. Pruno, they've got you know, you can walk in and you'll just get this whiff of sweetness and you're like, oh man, somebody is cooking something off in here and you go look and there's going to be a garbage bag or something somewhere they'll unravel strings from their blankets tied to a plastic. Fill it up with the fruit and eat us, all you need is fruit, you need sugar and yeast, basically sugar and yeast. And if you've got juice or whatever things you can, you let it ferment tied off in a bag, flush it down your toilet. We're not going to find it because it's in the toilet. Drag it back up with the string when you want to check on it. See how it's going. Yum, yum. I mean that that a lot of people will store things in their toilets that way. It's obvious. I'm just thinking, man, a jailhouse toilet, that's where I want to keep something that I'm eventually going to drink. Yeah, that's what I want to do. 

Alison DeBelder [00:40:32] I remember people used to yell down the pipes. Is that a thing or they used to bang on the pipes. Am I making this up? 

Tara Wildes [00:40:39] No, you're not making it up. They talk through the pipes. They talk through the toilets. They attempt to use the the plumbing systems as another way to pass notes and send contraband. I got in trouble one time many years ago because I did a I didn't get in trouble, but they just kind of warned me out about it. We were doing it was an article on HIV and how, you know, it's you know, at the time, jails and prisons were kind of hot spots for infection being passed in that way. And I was asked about why don't they hand out condoms in the facility? I said, well, this was back in the 90s. So we're in a very conservative environment where I just don't think that that's going to go in the environment that we have. And then I explained that we did refer to places where they could get free condoms and that kind of stuff. And I made the mistake of holding up a rubber glove and saying we always have these and they'll pull them out of the trash can. And the guys look at me. I said, well, there's five fingers in the glove. That's a whole workweek full of fun. And and then the guy looked at me goes, You got to be kidding me. I said, Hey, love will find a way and then that darn love will find a way. Thing was what the caption of the whole article was. And they wore me out about that for years. Every time something happens, somebody say, well, love will find a way to it, but it's true. They'll talk to the toilets. They will. The creativity is incredible. I mean, and that is again, one of one of the fun things. It's a challenge. And you're always trying to outthink other people. But that's to me, I don't know the human spirit trying to overcome this stuff. I mean, who can't be impressed by that is fascinating. 

Chris Moser [00:42:10] I read somewhere that there was a population in prison. That test or score is gifted, which is completely different from my quote unquote high achiever. But it's sort of like the outside the box divergent thinker that would come up with really creative ways to do things in difficult situations. 

Tara Wildes [00:42:28] I will say that a lot of people in jail, no matter what type of uniform they're wearing, are probably not neurotypical. 

Chris Moser [00:42:35] So can you elaborate a little bit more on what you mean by that? 

Tara Wildes [00:42:40] I don't think that people who choose to work in this environment always said if I could screen for ADHD, then I would hire everybody I could with ADHD, because in this environment, the ability to multitask, the ability to be able to intensely concentrate when you need to, everything that ADHD does for you is a benefit in this environment. And some of my best personnel are people. Some of them are treated, some of them are not who are living with ADHD. As far as the people that come through our doors, there's a lot of untreated mental illness. There's a lot of undiagnosed other neurological disorder, a lot of a lot of I think there's a lot to traumatic brain injuries that we don't capture. And we don't understand sometimes some of the most difficult people we've had to deal with when you do it. I did an unscientific survey. I say, tell me, did you ever have a head injury when you were a kid? And just about every one of them? Oh, yeah. My dad hit me in the head with an ax handle. One time I fell all the way down the stairs and laid there, not out for two hours for somebody found family. And when you start realizing a lot of these people have had traumatic brain injuries. And again, I'm not using that as an excuse for their actions. I'm just saying I think there's a connection there that we haven't got our hands and arms around yet to figure out what to do with it. And I think that's one other thing, too, when you're talking about people who have criminal justice system involved, looking at them as individuals, doing a deep dove on their physical and their psychological history and their social history to figure out what you can best do to provide them with opportunities to improve themselves. That's not being soft. That's not feeling sorry for people. Since most of these individuals are going to be getting out anyway, don't we want to put them out better than when we got them? Don't we want to put them out in a way that they're going to victimize people less? So the things I say people may perceive, oh, you were you're just soft on crime yourself. I'm no, I'm aren't on crime. I hate crime. I hate victimization. I want to reduce victimization as much as possible. But in doing so, I want to try to do the best we can with the people while we have them so that they're not contributing to chaos when they get out. 

Alison DeBelder [00:44:56] Wouldn't it be amazing if all these people who've had head injuries or diagnoses when they come into contact with the criminal justice system, if somebody had done all that work when they were kids, when it happened? Right. It's wild to me how many people we learn about their head injury, their brain damage after a crime has been committed. But nothing was offered to them at the time when help was the most possible. 

Tara Wildes [00:45:25] I think some of that's our overall culture here, that everyone is one hundred percent responsible for their behavior and that we have this emphasis on punishment, that if we just punish somebody hard enough, if we beat it out of them, I don't know how many times I've heard people say what he is doing. It is enough. When he was a kid, he would have been done that. I have seen people I have seen horrendous cases of child abuse where people have had their butts whipped far more and everything else whipped. And it did not change or correct their behavior. But what it did was make it worse. You know, I think that violence begets violence. And the more of it that you do, the more of it you pass along. So any time you can have an opportunity to decrease violence against each other, you're going to have a more positive outcome. 

Alison DeBelder [00:46:11] Yeah, it's wild to me that people think send them to be in a cage, right. Send them to be brutalized when that's how we ended up here in the first place. You take people who were brutalized as kids. They were brutalized in their community. And the answer is, and I don't mean to disparage the programs that you've run, but jails and prisons are brutal places. 

Tara Wildes [00:46:33] They are. One hundred percent agree. 

Alison DeBelder [00:46:35] Yeah. So the idea that you can take somebody who is brutalized and then behaved like somebody who is brutalized, send them off to be brutalized some more with a fiction that they're going to return to our community and behave differently is just wild to me. 

Tara Wildes [00:46:51] Yeah. And I think, you know, and again, looking at maybe maybe things that might come out that might be positive from the slowdown and the change of the pandemic has put us in. Maybe now is the time you step back and you look at it is we know what we're doing isn't working. We know that mass incarceration has made things worse instead of making things better. So why do we keep doing those same things? You know, you keep doing the same things. You keep coming out with those same results. And I don't have all the answers. I don't know all the answers, but I do know that it's time to try something else, this time to look at doing something differently. It's time to look at people as individuals and try to address those individual deficits that they have and come out with a better, more positive, more safe outcome in the end. 

Alison DeBelder [00:47:44] Can I ask you a question about gunning? Certainly, as you know, we talked a few times in our first season with defense attorneys and how they dealt with gunning. And what we're talking about is people who are incarcerated, masturbating intentionally in front of other people. And this is often certainly other people who are locked up, but attorneys, visitors and frequently I know corrections officers in general. How do you deal with gunning? 

Tara Wildes [00:48:17] I'll tell you, y'all gave me some trauma. When I listen to that podcast and I heard what you were saying, I'm like, oh, my God, that was happening when I was there. And nobody told me. I mean, that was that was appalling to me because I don't believe that anybody should be subjected to that kind of behavior. It's the worst. I'll tell you some of the things that we did. And I understand when you're in your situation as a public defender and you're defending a client, that's a completely different dynamic than what somebody is doing it in front of a nurse or in front of a of a correctional officer in a facility. Right. 

Alison DeBelder [00:48:47] Right. 

Tara Wildes [00:48:47] So if they're doing it in front of a correctional officer, we're going to do our disciplinary report. We're going to have our due process. We're going to have witnesses and we're going to take that disciplinary action against that individual. If they do it more than one time, then we're probably going to pursue charges on them, criminal charges, which again, that's certainly not going to create a good relationship between you and your client if you're pursuing criminal charges so that God knows that you're kind of stuck in that. If you say something about it, it just it creates all the problems that you guys described in those earlier podcasts. But isn't there 

Alison DeBelder [00:49:19] also a problem with your officers because it casts them if they report it in the role of a victim and they may not want to be perceived as a victim in that relationship? 

Tara Wildes [00:49:31] Absolutely. We had cases where they would not report it, where we knew it was going on and they wouldn't report it because they're like, you know, it's just something happens. I'm not a worry about it. Like, no, there's some there's some things that you don't tolerate because it just creates the control, the power dynamic in that situation. So one of the things that we started doing to address it was if somebody was known to gun them whenever they came out of their cell, they had to be handcuffed behind their back to be transported and escorted. You had to be handcuffed behind your back. You could still go see your attorney. You could still go to everybody. But you were going to be handcuffed behind your back because we couldn't trust you to have your hands out because you might do bad things with your hands or offensive things with your hands. That's the first thing we would do. The other thing we would do is kind of do a little psychological warfare because it is all about control. And we would look at this individual, see who was sending him money. So who he's writing, who his support system was then we would I would have I had a couple of male personnel who are really good at doing this. They would sit down with a one on one on that individual and say, hey, you know, I understand you've been doing this behavior. This is you know, this is not the right thing to do. You know, you need to be a man that's not the right way to be a man. Kind of talking that. And if they're not getting the reaction that they want out of it and they don't seem like the guy is going to stop doing it, then the next thing would be, well, I understand that this is your mom's name and number and this is what you're this is your mom's been sending you money. Cannot is it OK with you if I call your mom and tell her what you're doing to ask for her help in trying to get you beyond this or your girlfriend or your wife or even better, if he has both of those, if you call both of them and get them on a conference call and tell them about it, can I do that to try to overcome this? We never had a single time where somebody did it again after that conversation, with the exception of people that obviously had mental illness and had some uncontrollable type of impulses where and we did would occasionally have somebody like that. 

Alison DeBelder [00:51:31] I know there was a lawsuit in Chicago that was settled with the public defender's office, is my understanding, because they weren't keeping their employees safe and they were experiencing an assault when they were going into the Cook County jail. But also there was a lawsuit against the sheriff there from the sheriff's employees, the corrections officers, and I'm not sure if that case has settled. So I think it's a ubiquitous problem. 

Tara Wildes [00:51:58] Yeah, there was there was a case in the Florida state system as well. And I won't call the name of the facility because I'm not sure, but I remember it. But it was the medical personnel, the nurses in that facility who sued saying that the staff in that facility weren't keeping them safe from sexual harassment from from the inmates. 

Alison DeBelder [00:52:15] Do you have a sense of what people are doing right? People doing wrong? 

Tara Wildes [00:52:18] In what in what way? 

Alison DeBelder [00:52:20] I mean, administratively, are there places where it's not being policed or women aren't supported or. 

Tara Wildes [00:52:26] Yes. Like in some of your previous podcast, you've talked about how the male staff have been so funny and they've kind of make fun of it and make light of it like it's just something you have to tolerate. That's bullshit. You do not have to tolerate that. And that's what as an administrator, you have to react to those kind of things. When that happens, you have to do something, whatever it is, you have to do something to try to make that not happen again. It's not something you just ignore and say, oh, well, that's just what happens in a jail. No, that is not just what happens in a jail. That shouldn't happen anywhere. 

Alison DeBelder [00:52:59] Is it a cultural thing? Has culture shifted and this is happening more or has this always been the case? 

Tara Wildes [00:53:05] It seems more prevalent now, it does seem more prevalent, I can remember the very first time I came across it, it was somebody who was obviously very mentally ill, having a psychotic break, and he had been masturbating for eight hours straight, eight hours straight when I was because I was told I was the sergeant on the booking floor, the old Duval County jail. The sergeant, I believe, said so. And so's back there in the holding cell. He's been masturbating. He used other language for four, eight hours straight. And he says, I ain't going back for him. I don't need to look at that. I'm not dealing with that. I said, OK, well, somebody has got a him. I went back there and I talked to him and he continued to do the behavior like it was, you know, he was just he was out of it totally. I mean, he was just so completely gone. And I said, you know, I said, can you answer these questions for me? He said, certainly. So I asked him each question and afterwards he'd say, well, certainly I can answer that. And he would say, I mean, he was very psychotic. We got to the end. I said, would you like to sign this paper for me? And he said, yes, because it's all paper based. Back then I put the clipboard through the bars. This was a bar facility. I hand him the pen and he stopped doing what he was doing and he signed it and hand it back to me. I said, Well, thank you very much, sir. And he went to hand the pen back. I said, you can keep that pen and back. And I said, I look back and I hand it to the other side, said, goddamn book, asshole. I said, Here you go. Oh, by the way, he's got a pen. You have to go get it. And but that was the first time and this guy was obviously psychotic. And I did not experience that again for I want to say many years. And it does seem like probably I want to say maybe the late nineties. It started. It started. It started. And I don't know what his change culturally to make that such a a issue. But, yeah, there is there's more of it than there used to be by people who are not necessarily severely mentally ill. It is an issue of control. And I'm going to do what I think I can do and get away with. 

Alison DeBelder [00:55:05] I know that you listened to our first season of episodes. Was there anything that stood out to you from that that you wanted to talk about today? 

Tara Wildes [00:55:16] I think one thing is our shared experiences in the criminal justice system of the things, even though we may be in different places in the system, running a correctional facility is is far different from being a public defender, which is different from being a prosecutor, which is different from being a police officer. But the common thing I keep hearing and seeing is the amount of involvement in the people we work with is just I don't think the public has any perception of how deep we deal with the human beings that are what we focus on. It's not just a job. None of these professions in the criminal justice system, none of these are just a job to me. And in my opinion, there may be people who look at it that way. And I have a lot of people who will say I'm will do something else. But the shared experiences, the trauma we all go through, the crisis that we all see, that people are dealing with, the things that we can't control are so immense. They really, really are the impact of poverty on people's lifestyles, the impact of substance abuse on people's lifestyles, all of those kind of things that we can't control. But yet people think all of these professions are controlling professions, that we're the we're the enforcers or we're the I just that's the one thing that just kept striking every time I listened, you know, and everybody had different experiences. But it's the fascination with the people that we work with. I think we all share that fascination of what makes people do the things they do, what drives human behavior and what can we do to impact that behavior. 

Alison DeBelder [00:56:49] And I wanted to ask you what your advice is for a person who has a loved one, who has been thrust into the criminal justice system. Right, whether that's a child or parent, somebody they love is arrested. Do you have any advice for them about how to be a good support or get through it? 

Tara Wildes [00:57:10] Yeah, absolutely. First, find out what the rules are and the facility that that person is in, they'll likely have an inmate handbook or they'll have some sort of resource. A lot of things are online. Read everything you can about it because your job changes when somebody gets incarcerated, your job changes from being a parent or a friend to being an advocate for that individual. And so you want to advocate for them and the best way that you can. And one of the best ways you can is by knowing the rules and by supporting them and helping them understand the rules from the facility that they're that they're going to be in and maintaining contact as much contact as you can if you can't visit in person than do the video visits, phone calls and prisons and jails are so expensive. And that's that is also a travesty. And we can probably talk for another hour about the expense of that of what people have to deal with that are incarcerated. And it's not the incarcerated person paying that expense. Of course, it's their family members that pay that. But maintaining that exterior support for that person is going to be the best thing that you can do for them. If they're having court appearances, be there for their court appearance, try to talk to their public defender, try to talk to their prosecutor, be involved in the case. That's the one thing I see from almost anybody in this system. If they have involved people, they have better outcomes. But people tend not to be involved because they think, oh, if I'm involved and they're going to retaliate against him or they're going to think I'm a pain in the butt or they're going to know. I mean, I'm not saying that it doesn't happen. I have seen evidence of it happening. I've seen facilities where I don't want to be bothered with this. But most of the time, it's just like anything else in this world. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, learn how to work the chain of command. Everybody has a supervisor. You can be polite, you can be nice, and you can still work that chain of command and go up to the top if you're not getting the right kind of answer. I'm dealing with a complaint that I received from the attorney general today, and it's a minor complaint. But I'm reading it and I'm thinking, you know, if this person would have just worked the chain of command when they made their initial phone call, this complaint would have gone away because they could have got to a person who could have given them the right kind of answers. Instead, they got frustrated dealing with a lower level person who couldn't give them the answers that they wanted or needed, and they escalated up to that level. But I will say this. If you're dealing in a system where you can't get that kind of help and you have used the chain of command, then do escalate. It escalated up to that upper level. You go to the attorney general, go to whoever the authority is that supervises them, are watchdogs them. 

Alison DeBelder [00:59:39] Thank you so much for spending this time with us today. We appreciate you being here. 

Tara Wildes [00:59:44] Thank you for having me. It's been a joy. 

Alison DeBelder [00:59:47] Trauma and justice is created by Chris Moser and Alison DeBelder and engineered by Chris Higgins. Thanks for listening to help us out. Please subscribe to the podcast, leave a star rating and review for us on Apple podcasts and share with others who might be interested. Follow us and share your feedback on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at Trauma Injustice.