ICPA Board Member Rob Jeffreys Receives 2026 AWEC Legacy Award
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Throughout his career, Rob has emphasized that lasting progress is built through sponsorship by giving talented people meaningful responsibility, real decision-making authority, and the opportunity to lead work that matters.
Read the full interview below:
1. You’ve led major correctional systems in Ohio, Illinois, and now Nebraska, each with very different politics, budgets, labour dynamics, and public expectations. Looking back, what have those three roles taught you about what effective correctional leadership really requires?
I came into corrections from the ground level- research, classification, programming, and operations- trying to understand how the system actually works day to day. Over time, what changed was not simply my position; it was how I defined success.
Ohio taught me the importance of understanding operations. Illinois taught me that large systems can change when leaders are willing to challenge practices that have become institutionalized. Nebraska has reinforced something equally important: Lasting correctional reform requires community engagement.
The biggest evolution in my thinking has been moving from managing facilities to managing systems to focusing on outcomes that actually matter.
Effective correctional leadership requires clarity of purpose, courage in adversity, and enough humility to recognize when something is not working. A leader has to establish a mission people understand, build a strategy around measurable outcomes, invest in the workforce, and then create accountability for execution.
That also means making difficult decisions without becoming emotionally tethered to the way things have always been done. When the evidence tells us to change direction, we should change direction.
Leadership is not ultimately about the position you hold. It is about the responsibility you carry for your staff, the people in your custody, and the communities to which almost all of those individuals will eventually return.
That is what makes corrections difficult. It is also what makes the work matter.
2. In Illinois, restrictive housing fell by about 40%, and the overall prison population reached its lowest level since 1991. Which two or three decisions mattered most, and what trade-offs or pushback did you have to manage to sustain the change?
The most important decision was recognizing that population management, restrictive housing, and reentry were not separate issues. They were different parts of the same correctional system.
First, we examined the mechanisms already available to us. Corrections does not determine who receives a prison sentence, but it does control important parts of how people progress through that sentence: Control the controllables. We strengthened the use of earned discretionary sentence credit and more clearly connected incentives to conduct, programming, and individualized case planning.
Second, we fundamentally restructured restrictive housing. Illinois had longstanding practices that varied across facilities. We established a statewide framework governing placement, conditions, programming, and oversight. During my tenure, the restrictive-housing population declined by approximately 40 percent.
Third, we elevated reentry from something that happened near the end of a sentence to a core correctional mission. We created a dedicated Reentry Division and strengthened work around housing, identification documents, healthcare access, and the transition back into the community.
Those changes were accompanied by a broader review of policy and standards because reform does not become institutional simply because a director announces it. It has to be written into policy, translated into practice, measured, and audited.
The lesson was straightforward: Correctional leaders should continually ask whether a practice exists because evidence supports it or simply because the system has always operated that way.
The result was not one initiative. It was a series of aligned decisions that increased access to programs and helped Illinois reach its lowest prison population since 1991.
3. You often emphasise research and data as the foundation for decision-making. Practically, how do you build a culture where evidence is trusted, especially when the data challenges long-standing operational habits? What does that look like in day-to-day leadership?
Correctional systems make an extraordinary number of decisions every day, and those decisions directly affect the safety and security of the people who live and work inside our prisons. My perspective is simple: We make better decisions with better data.
I started my career in research, so data has always shaped the way I approach corrections. But I also understand the operational reality. People outside our profession sometimes assume data-driven decision-making should be easy. If Amazon can track millions of packages and consistently get the right package to the right address, why can't every organization operate with the same level of information?
Those of us in corrections know the difference. We are in the difficult business of keeping people safe while creating opportunities for people to change their lives. And we are often doing it with data systems and technology that lag well behind the private sector, with significantly fewer resources.
That makes it even more important to be disciplined about the information we do have.
For me, data-driven leadership starts with asking three questions: What are we trying to accomplish? How will we know whether we are succeeding? And what will we do differently based on what the data tells us?
That is where Key Performance Indicators (KPI) become important. A KPI should not exist simply because something can be counted. It should connect directly to an organizational objective and help leaders make an operational decision. Whether we are examining violence, staffing, restrictive housing, programming, grievances, healthcare, reentry, or community supervision, I want to know what the measure is telling us and, more importantly, what action it requires.
I also challenge our research and analytical teams to go beyond producing graphs, charts, and tables. Give leaders actionable insight. Where is the problem? What is driving it? Where are the outliers? What changed? What should we be asking next?
The same expectation applies to operational leaders. Wardens and executives do not need to become statisticians, but they should know how to interpret the data. If one facility is outperforming another, ask why. If violence suddenly increases, identify where, when, and among whom. If an intervention is working, determine whether you can replicate it. If the evidence contradicts a long-standing practice, have the courage to reconsider the practice.
That is also how you build a culture that values data. Data should not be used as a weapon; it should be used as a flashlight. The purpose is not to catch people doing something wrong. It is to illuminate what is happening so we can make better decisions.
I have used that approach throughout my career, from analyzing correctional populations early in my career, to using violence and operational data with wardens, to building performance-management systems that tracked strategic priorities and measurable outcomes across large correctional agencies. The technology has changed, but the principle has not.
Ultimately, the goal is not more data. The goal is better decisions. And in corrections, better decisions can mean safer prisons, better use of limited resources, stronger outcomes for staff and residents, and ultimately safer communities.
4. You received the AWEC Legacy Award for consistent support of women in corrections leadership. From an operational standpoint, how does greater gender equity improve performance and outcomes in a corrections organisation—and what have you found actually works to advance it?
Women get things done! But there is a larger leadership point behind that statement. Corrections cannot afford to leave talent on the sidelines. Professional opportunities in this field should not be reserved for one gender, one career path, or one traditional image of what a correctional leader looks like.
I have had the privilege of working with extraordinary women who lead prisons, budgets, operations, reentry initiatives, and major organizational change. Their success did not happen because someone created a ceremonial seat at the table. It happened because they were given meaningful responsibility, decision-making authority, and opportunities to lead.
That is what I have found works. If organizations are serious about developing women leaders, mentorship is important, but sponsorship is equally important. Put talented people in consequential assignments. Give them exposure to executive decision-making. Give them responsibility for difficult problems. Create succession pathways. Then get out the way!
Diversity in leadership also improves the quality of organizational thinking. Corrections deals with enormously complex human problems. We need leaders with different experiences and perspectives who challenge assumptions and see problems from angles others may miss.
The goal is not simply representation. The goal is building the strongest leadership team possible. When you recognize, develop, and trust talent with real authority, the entire organization benefits.
5. As a former President of the CLA and a board member of ICPA, you have a national and international vantage point. What is one practice other jurisdictions should learn from right now, and what is one widely used approach you think the field should reconsider?
International corrections has reinforced a basic principle for me: People should be treated as people.
Many systems outside the United States operationalize concepts such as normalization, human dignity, and reintegration more intentionally. That does not mean every international practice can simply be imported into another jurisdiction. Political systems, sentencing structures, resources, and cultures are different. But the underlying question travels remarkably well: Are we designing correctional systems around the person we eventually want to return to the community?
Historically, corrections has often viewed people primarily as risks and liabilities to contain. Once that becomes the organizing principle, it influences architecture, staffing, programming, and budgets.
I think we should reconsider that premise. What if we treated people as assets with the capacity to improve? Other major institutions do this routinely. Universities develop human potential. The military takes people with different backgrounds, builds skills, establishes expectations, and develops capability. Corrections should be equally intentional about human development.
That does not diminish accountability or security. Safe prisons remain fundamental. But security and rehabilitation should not be competing missions. A well-run correctional system should use the period of incarceration to improve the likelihood that a person returns home healthier, better educated, more employable, and more connected to family and community.
That leads to the larger lesson I have taken from working nationally and internationally: Corrections cannot solve these problems alone.
Housing, healthcare, mental health, substance use, education and employment are not exclusively correctional problems. They are societal issues that become concentrated inside correctional institutions.
If I were designing a correctional system from scratch today, I would build a continuum of care around the prison, rather than expecting the prison to become its own healthcare system, mental-health system, school system, workforce system and social-service system.
The future of corrections is therefore not simply better prisons. It is better integration between corrections and the systems already responsible for health, education, employment, housing and community wellbeing.
I would also measure success differently, not simply by beds occupied, incidents counted, or rules complied with, but by a more consequential question:
Are people better prepared to succeed when they leave our custody than when they entered it?
If the answer is yes, we are not only operating better correctional systems. We are producing safer communities.
