Before Gov. Tom Corbett appointed John Wetzel as secretary of the state Department of Corrections in 2011, the job primarily was about operations.
But across the Republican Corbett and Democratic Wolf administrations, Wetzel made the position an engine of major prison and criminal justice reforms. Now, he leaves a vastly different system as he resigns to start a nonprofit organization to press further reforms.
The fundamental difference in Wetzel’s method was that he approached the system in terms of human costs rather than budgetary costs alone. He advocated ends to draconian mandatory minimum sentences and probation policies that helped drive the state prison population past 51,000 and its cost to taxpayers beyond $2 billion a year.
Due to that advocacy, coupled with reform-minded legislators and judges endorsing and implementing alternative sentencing and probation and parole reforms, the state prison population is about 7,000 lower, 14%, than it was when Wetzel took office.
His tenure was not without controversy. He closed several prisons, including one in Luzerne County, which reduced prison employment in areas where the institutions were important to local economies. And the prison system, like most nationwide, struggled to deal with COVID-19.
As an organizational matter, the prison system is a distinct part of the state government. But Wetzel knows that the system is the business end of multiple failures of government and society much earlier in the lives of the people who end up in prison.
He’s a strong advocate for better early education, better access to mental health treatment, and greater access to training and opportunities to continue reducing the prison population, beyond the internal reforms to the criminal justice and prison systems.
As Pennsylvania corrections secretary, Wetzel was a national leader in criminal justice and prison reform, a status he likely will retain as he departs a system that is substantially better than the one he took over a decade ago.
— Scranton Times-Tribune/AP
