LINCOLN, Neb. (Nebraska Examiner) — Scott Frakes arrived from Washington State in 2015 with a mandate to turn around a troubled state prison system in Nebraska, which suffered from overcrowding, staff shortages and a scandal involving the mistaken early release of some inmates.
The 64-year-old leaves his $255,000-a-year post later this month for retirement in his home state after 40 years in corrections.
During his tenure, there were two deadly riots at a rural prison in Tecumseh, and prison overcrowding rose to the highest in the nation. There was also a pandemic to manage and, before that, a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging inadequate medical treatment for inmates, a suit that was eventually dismissed.
Staffing emergencies eased
But there were also improvements in security staff pay that has allowed “staffing emergencies” to be eased, an addition of 808 new prison beds and an upgrading of sentence calculations to ensure everyone served their required time behind bars.
As Frakes leaves, the state is on the cusp of approving a new, 1,500-bed prison in eastern Nebraska to replace the aging State Penitentiary in Lincoln — a new prison Frakes suggested might have been built by now if the state, like others, allowed borrowing money for big projects.
Gov. Pete Ricketts, who hired Frakes shortly after he took office, described the prison chief as a “highly effective leader.”
Some say progress slow
That’s an opinion not shared universally. Some lawmakers and advocates feel that Frakes didn’t move fast enough to solve the overcrowding, didn’t embrace sentencing reforms recommended by comprehensive studies and wasn’t supportive of alternatives to building a costly new prison.
During a recent, one-hour question-and-answer session with the Nebraska Examiner, Frakes said he feels that he’s leaving the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services in better shape than he found it, particularly in terms of adequate staffing and the morale of security staff.
Major challenges, he said, lay ahead in hiring adequate mental health and medical staff to treat the state’s 5,500 prison inmates — a population that is about 1,900 higher that the state’s nine prisons were designed to hold.
Q: Why are you leaving now?
A: I came here with a five-year plan. Corrections directors typically last in these jobs for three years. When five years came, I wasn’t ready to go. At that time we were beginning the discussion of replacing the State Penitentiary, and the governor asked if I’d stay.
I obviously feel like I’m going out on a high point. I have good people in place and felt the organization was in a good place for the transition.
Q: What surprised you most about the job you faced in Nebraska?
A: Learning the politics and learning how to maneuver through the Legislature, that was new.
There was a fair amount of negative press suggesting that the agency was not competent, but that’s not what I found when I got here.
Honestly, the biggest surprise was that it wasn’t the State Pen (the state’s oldest and one of the most overcrowded prisons) that was in the most tenuous situation, it was Tecumseh. I missed that one. It was an eye opener.
Q: Can you talk about the riots that occurred at Tecumseh?
A: Really, it was a perfect-storm incident, the May 10, 2015, (riot). An acting sergeant tried to do the best they could, there was some miscommunication, and the next thing you know, they’ve got most of the institution outside their living units.
We were definitely short on staff — not for normal operations, but when you get in a situation like that, they didn’t have anyone they could immediately turn to.
A series of small errors contributed to a big, bad outcome. (Two inmates were killed, staff were assaulted and housing units were burned in that Mother’s Day Riot. Two others were killed during a riot in 2017.)
Q: Did that lead to the construction of a new, high-security unit in Lincoln to deal with the worst-behaving inmates?
A: I was here a year before I decided that we didn’t have the right physical plant for part of our population.
Nebraska is a pay-as-you-go state. There’s nothing wrong with that. But that means you have to be really thoughtful and strategic when it comes to large capital projects.
Our 2014 master plan recommended that we needed a couple million of construction. I wasn’t going to get that in one session. On the flip side, we didn’t have the (engineering) capacity. We hadn’t done any major construction for 10 years.
Now we have the capacity … to do things like replacing the State Pen.
Q: Can the state now afford to look at other options, such as sentence reforms and earlier parole if appropriate, to avoid building a new, $270-million prison?
A: The good answer, the right answer, is no. We’ve already burned one more year than we should have.
You can always find solutions to these failures. States across the country have done it for years. It is not the right way to do business. It can lead to some really bad outcomes.
We had the broken water pipes a year ago (at the State Pen). I won’t be surprised if it happens again.
Q: What do you think is the current state of prison overcrowding here?
A: The State Pen is still an example of a facility holding twice as many people as it was built to handle. (Its design capacity is 818 inmates, and it currently holds about 1,350). It’s got too small of a dining hall, too small a kitchen, no recreation space, no programming space, day rooms that aren’t big enough for the 20 people they were built for, much less that 40 that use them.
That facility is going to continue to be a problem. But work we’ve done at the Reception and Treatment Center and Community Corrections Center in Lincoln have allowed them to be good, healthy facilities.
We’ve added about 800 beds across the system. Given all the challenges that come with that, that’s pretty amazing.
Q: What’s your proudest achievement?
A: Today I’m going to go with how this agency managed through the pandemic. Not only did we do an exceptionally good job of keeping people safe and healthy through a national/international emergency, but we continued to prepare inmates for their release.
I’ll stack our work up against any correctional system in the country during a time many thought everyone who was incarcerated was going to die from COVID.
Many of my peers really struggled. They had expectations and requirements that made it very difficult to do the job … an extreme amount of testing, mandatory testing, mandating masks.
We required masks, but what we weren’t going to do is go to war (over it) and battle with the population. We mandated it for staff, and we worked hard for the population to cooperate. But we didn’t make it a disciplinary issue.
Q: What is your biggest disappointment?
A: Not the getting the State Pen replacement funded. But I’m still optimistic everything will come together and it will happen.
Most of the money that’s needed is sitting in a pot. We’ve done more than $18 million in design work.
(Getting the new prison approved) would have been a kind of the feather in the cap. Right now, we’d be going out for bid.
I did have a lot of lofty ideas. And then life gets in the way. I certainly could not have predicted some of the bumps and the pandemic. So I do wonder how much further we could have gotten in terms of programming and some other things.
Q: What about the future?
A: I think 2023 is going to be an amazing year for this agency. Staffing is in as good a place as we’ve been for at least 10 years, if not longer. And not just vacancy filled, but good people.
There’s lots of people now who are engaged with and excited about being part of facilitating activities. That really wasn’t our culture when I got here in 2015.
We have accepted and grown and embraced the idea of “peer led” activities — we have our trained inmate peer support folks. A few live at the state youth prison in Omaha. We’ve allowed them to work together as peer mentors.
It’s that kind of stuff that not only allows us to be better at what we do, but changes the culture.
Q: What about staff morale?
A: We had town hall meetings, what we call dialogues, in August and September. It sure felt different than back in 2018. There were a couple of ones in 2015 where folks were a little hostile. We didn’t have any of that (now). It was just really pleasant to go out and see generally how satisfied staff were.
Yeah, we have to figure out health care and mental health staffing, our food service staffing. Some of that will come through contract negotiations, but some of that is bigger than us. It’s bigger than Nebraska. Either technology is going to fix that or there needs to be some other solution that brings people in.
Q: You said that the 25% raises provided to security staff in November were a game changer?
A: We tried a lot of different things. None of them moved the dial enough. When we figured out the right combination for compensation, that was like the perfect-perfect storm.
We have all the pieces in place to have a happy, engaged, motivated workforce.
Q: What is the state of corrections nationally today, given the custody death of George Floyd, renewed concerns about mass incarceration and a push from some state legislators for alternatives to prison?
A: In general, it’s a heck of lot better. I entered at a time when we were in the early throes of “Nothing works, let’s warehouse people.” They went to determinant sentences. Washington state had 5,500 inmates in 1985. By the early 2000s, it was 17,000.
We had this huge building boom that began in the late ’80s, when it was “tough on crime,” but those prisons are aging out. The bill is going to be huge.
Today, we’re investing a lot more heavily in programming, treatment and improving living conditions. And then the best thing of all is this growing recognition that we shouldn’t just build prisons for safety, but so they are healthy for the staff.
Q: What are you going to miss most — dealing with the Legislature?
A: I’m not going to give you a quote on that (laughing). I’m going to miss the people, the team in this building, but I also enjoy getting out again to inmate symposiums.
Q: What is the biggest challenge ahead for the Nebraska prison system?
A: As long as the economy remains strong (and the labor market tight), it’s going to continue to be the staffing challenges. The mental health staffing challenge is even tougher.
If the economy goes the other direction, then the challenge is doing more with less. How do you cut the budget by 5%? If you have to cut the budget by 10%, you have to close a facility.
We talk about this business being like an oil tanker — it moves slow and is hard to turn. But societal expectations continue to change, and that directly influences the expectations within a prison.
We’re right on the cusp of having a population that expects everyone to have a (computer) tablet, and someday it will be a cell phone — that it’s a right, instead of privilege. Back in the day, it was a privilege to make a phone call or send a letter.
Q: Will you remain in the field?
A: I am committed to making no decision for 90 days. Potentially, some consulting work. I really don’t want to have a job. I would like to find something that is soul-filling, something to help people. It would be nice to try something a little different.
I’ve made amazing friends in Nebraska. I’ve been to just about every quilt store (with his wife, a quilter). And I got reinvested in my tennis game (including winning a State Games title in singles). I have never come across anything like the tennis community here, in Omaha and especially in Lincoln. When you play tennis, unlike golf, you don’t think about anything else except not to get hit by the ball.
Q: What’s the most important thing you want Nebraskans to know?
A: Corrections is an essential part of the criminal justice system. For many years we kind of operated in the shadows — to some degree that’s how we liked it. To some extent the public, as long as we took care of our business, that’s all they wanted to know.
But today’s corrections is not a Jimmy Cagney movie with steel bars. We are trying to help people prepare and return to the community and be productive members of the community.
Good investments in criminal justice, juvenile justice and corrections, it is money well spent.
I would love for us some day to figure out solutions that mean very few people will be incarcerated. But unfortunately, there’s a part of our society who do some very dangerous and heinous things.
Nebraska Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Cate Folsom for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com. Follow Nebraska Examiner on Facebook and Twitter.
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