Scott Semple: Former Connecticut Commissioner of Correction

We were honored to host Scott Semple, the former Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Correction, as our March 2023 White Collar Support Group Tuesday Night Speaker Series presenter. Scott entered a Connecticut prison in 1988 as a front line officer and left thirty one years later running the system. He told us what he tried to change from the top. You can watch the full recording above.

Scott is a Republican who sat in Governor Dannel Malloy’s cabinet, the only one in it, and on criminal justice the two agreed almost entirely. He nearly turned the job down. His only child, Matthew, was fifteen and had just been diagnosed with a rare cancer, and Scott told the governor’s office he meant to decline and go be a father. Matthew talked him into it. He told his dad he had never liked being bossed around, so he might as well be the boss. Matthew died on New Year’s Day, 2015. Scott took the job.

Is a prison system in the business of corrections or incapacitation?

Connecticut held about 7,000 incarcerated people when Scott started. By 2007 it held close to 20,000, and by his own description it was not safe for anyone in it, staff included. His college friends had told him he was out of his mind for taking the work. Most of them, he says, were arguing with a television show rather than with what can actually be changed inside a facility.

The line he comes back to is whether a system is in the business of corrections or of incapacitation. Around his fifteenth year, after an honest inventory of what the job had put in him, he made himself a promise about what he would do if he ever got to decide.

He advises the Justice Department now. Asked where reform inside the Federal Bureau of Prisons should begin, he pointed at the name on the building.

Stop calling it the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Why Connecticut rewrote its earned credit system

Connecticut already had a risk reduction earned credit law when Scott became commissioner. Everyone earned at the same rate, maximum security or minimum, so credits paid for time passing, not for anything a person did with it. He rewrote the schedule so credits grew as someone moved down through security levels.

So the message that we were trying to send to the incarcerated population is that we will be accountable to people who choose to be accountable to themselves.

Anyone following First Step Act earned time credits is watching the same design argument play out federally. Connecticut held almost 17,000 people when Scott took over and 13,000 when he retired in 2019. He is careful about that second number, because the system was never built to receive the people it was sending home, and it is the person, not the system, who gets counted in the recidivism rate.

At a community forum, a man who had served more than twenty years told him what that felt like. He had somewhere to be, got on a bus, could not work out how the transit system runs now, and panicked. His first instinct was to run, because running was the response he knew. He also did not know how to wash his hands in a public bathroom, because the faucet ran off a sensor. Our members who have come home have their own version of that morning, which is why Building A New Life After Prison sits where new members can find it, and why Erin Frey’s Yale study of second chances that arrive coupled with punishment is that morning with data behind it.

How the TRUE Unit at Cheshire started with a trip to Germany

A few months into the job, the Vera Institute of Justice asked Scott to come see the German prison model. He was still numb from losing Matthew. He went anyway. The stop that redirected his career was a facility built around emerging adults, 18 to 25, and the brain science on impulsivity. Back home he ran the query: roughly 3,200 people in Connecticut in that band, responsible for about a quarter of every incident inside the state’s prisons.

He asked Vera to find an American system already doing it so Connecticut could borrow the design. Nothing of the kind existed here.

What Connecticut built instead opened at Cheshire Correctional Institution in 2017, the TRUE Unit. Scott put older incarcerated men in it as mentors, over the objection of specialists he cheerfully calls a lot smarter than he is, and he checked every step with justice involved people first, because they read a prison system’s politics as well as anyone on payroll. Louis L. Reed made that same case to our group from the other side of the table, and Adam Bentley Clausen built the same idea inside a federal prison, with no commissioner behind him. How he got more than 200 volunteer staff trained and a mentor corps standing in about eighteen months is the part worth hearing him tell.

What he noticed first was his own officers. They stopped saying inmate and started saying mentee.

About Scott Semple

Scott Semple was appointed Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Correction in March 2015, after a year as interim commissioner. He joined the department in 1988 as a front line correction officer at the high security Cheshire Correctional Institution and moved through three decades of ranks, including warden of the state’s only facility for men needing treatment for significant mental illness. As commissioner he created the emerging adult units at Cheshire and Niantic and put agency wide staff wellness programs in place. He retired in 2019 and consults nationally.

I first got to know Scott when I was executive director of Family Reentry in Connecticut. The first call I made in that job was to him, and he helped. We live a couple of miles apart now.

This presentation was free, open to all, and held on Zoom on March 21, 2023 at 7 PM ET. It is part of the Tuesday Night Speaker Series hosted by the White Collar Support Group, which meets every Monday evening on Zoom.