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How Do Jails Work?
David Thaxton • 2026-05-05
Dylan Carnahan:Welcome to the Simple Questions Podcast. This is your host, Dylan Carnahan. The question for this episode is, how do jails work? You will learn in this episode, the difference between jails and prisons, the reality of daily operations in a jail, and how the justice system can better serve society. Our guest was a non-commissioned officer in the Army National Guard, was the warden of the Wyandotte County Detention Center in Kansas City, Kansas, and is the author of Beyond the Cell, Transforming Jails into Arenas of Change. I introduce to you David Thaxton. I am a younger child when I go to Old Settler's Day in downtown Olathe. And I'm out and about, and some kids are talking about this building. And specifically, it's a building down like the main street in Olathe, and I didn't know what it was. And that's when I found out it was a jail. And I just remember my first thing was that I was scared. I was like, you know, jails are scary. People that are in jails are scary. And I just remember that being like the first time I had really heard of anything like that. And so I just like to share kind of my first experience. So I'm curious, David, you know, about your journey and how you ultimately got into law enforcement.
David Thaxton:Well, enforcement wasn't my first pick. I didn't even graduate high school. Ended up getting my GED when I turned 20 and saying, oh crap, I got to do something with my life. But ever since I was a little kid, it's like the coolest thing the men in my family ever did was be a service member. My dad's sides were all Marines. Well, my mother's side was a, my grandfather or my mom's side was a Marine also, but my two uncles were in the Army. I said, well, I probably need to do that. There was a service filling that I had to do, like a way out. So I said, let's do this. When I tried to join, I scored a 49. Back then in 1994, 95, and that's when Bill Clinton came in and kind of shrugged this and you had to score. If I would have graduated high school, I would have been able to join. But the thing was, is I had that GED, so I needed to get a 50. My last real grade was my freshman year, and so when I took my GED test, that took me a couple of months to go back and get it done. So I never knew what it was like to be a student and take test really. Man, I scored a 49, recruiter told me, well, you needed to get a 50 with the GED. Just give me a waiver, man. It's one point, dude. He's like, no, you got to come back and take it again. I said, mother. So I turn around and I go back and I take the damn test and I score 32 this time. So now I'm feeling like I'm a real stupid idiot, because hey, try to get a job or something. Someone's like, well, at least you cared enough to go back with your GED. I think I'm a real dummy. So I'm like, you have no idea what it's like growing up the way I grew up. So for you to talk to me like this, it's like beta determination in me. My dad actually, he had told me to go down and check out the Kansas Army now. It's like, it's a state army, but it's still underneath the United States Army. It's still the same training. And so sure enough, I go down there and the recruiter's like, dude, we're the States Army. We've got a little bit different standards to get in, but we train the same. So I said, great. X was not liking that one damn bit. She said a lot of choice words to me about it. But you know, I had that feeling. So I said, man, I got to join. Well, I had did construction work from 17 and all the way. You know, probably I joined the Guard when I was 21. I did construction work until I was probably 26. So I came back from deployment with the Guard in Germany. And I came back and I said, I don't want to do construction work anymore. This shit is killing me, man. It's tough, hard work. And so I said, you know what? I'll be a cop. I will be a cop. And I tried, you know, and what's funny about it is that I really tried from 21, that cop thing came to me shortly after I joined the service. I said, you know what? Being a police officer is similar to being a soldier. You're representing the Constitution. You're doing something for the community. Let's get into this. Let's try it. Six years, applying three to six times a year at different agencies within the metro area. I finally got on at the Wyandotte County Sheriff's Office. And what's crazy is that my grandfather, both grandfathers, my grandpa Frank, was a reserve officer back in the 70s. Then I had my mother's father, grandpa John, that guy retired from the Sheriff's Office in 2002. And so I had to buy three times before they finally hire me, man. I said, Christ, you figured out I was a legacy hire. I couldn't even get on until the third time. And so when I got on, I'll never forget it. I ended up working with him for the next 22 years. But he looked at me and he says, now I didn't know anything about the Sheriff's Office. What's crazy across the United States, some run a jail, some don't. It just depends on the jurisdiction of where you're at. Me and he's like, you're only going to be a pod officer. You're never going to be in a car. The only thing you're ever going to do is ensure the inmates aren't killing themselves. That's the only thing you're ever going to do. Okay with that. Well, I should shit, man. I was a construction worker and an infantry soldier. I lived outside. You know, I worked 12 to 16 hour days of damn hard physical labor. It was either roofing, delivering shingles or hard carrying. People don't know what hard carrying is. That is brickwork. You do the hard work for the bricklayers. You build the scaffold, you make the mud, and you brick and you keep them flowing so that they don't stop throughout the entire day. You get a 30-minute break out of a 12-hour day. So when you're out there in the heat, and somebody tells you, hold on a second, I looked at him and I said, I get to be inside 12 hours a day. I get free coffee. I get clean uniforms. I get health insurance, state or government health insurance, government retirement. I said, hey, man, when do I get to start tomorrow? No, I get to work inside and I get to be clean. The worst thing I have to do is enforce some rules. Give me the job, man. From then on, it was like profession. This is what you're going to try to learn about and this is what you're going to try to change. I get free. Some of the cop thing came in as what's crazy is violent growing up. And so, there was a lot of criminal and activity or grandfathers were part law enforcement. It's like it missed their children somewhere, you know, when they had my generation. That middle group, the baby boomer guys, they were a little wild with the antisocial belief systems. And I saw criminality at a young age, drug use. I remember sitting in the car with my grandmother belling my uncles out, you know, on my mom's side. The same county jail that my grandfather worked at, his kids were going to jail. And, you know, sitting out there with my grandmother belling them out. It was ridiculous. So I saw it on both sides, you know. I saw officers who came and were professional and did the proper thing. And then I saw real jerks, you know. Real jerks, too, you know. People who didn't want to listen or officers who didn't want to listen. Officers just think that, you know, they had the power. They could just tell you what to do. And I saw that from probably the age of reckoning, 7, 8 through high school years. I remember, you know, bad encounters with the police. And so there's an adage that says, if you can't beat them, join them, you know, something like that. And so I said, you know, there was a lot of good. I just wanted to add. And so I didn't know how to do it when I first got started. But after a while, I learned and I said, okay, well, these are the things that can make things a little bit better, you know, and that even was evolving over my entire career. So that, in a nutshell, is pretty much how I got into law enforcement. I just wanted to be had that feeling, you know, being, I guess, being raised in welfare and then good and bad on both sides, you know, to see if you can actually make a dent in the system, see if you can change things, you know, because I tell people all the time, you know, if you're going to get into law enforcement, if you're moving up, you should probably learn a great deal about psychology and not just the law. Get the job, we're going to send you to the police academy, get 40 hours of training every year. You're going to get on the job training when it comes to the legal logistics and different aspects of the career. But we really don't hit on psychology enough in the field. And yeah, it's starting to make its way in. It's crisis intervention and training and the peer support that's just now started a couple of years ago, but it's deep enough on both sides to understand criminality.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah. So David, I want to get into a couple of things that you just mentioned. So first off, I appreciate you sharing your story. And there are many things within that. David, I want to get into the whole jail part. We used a couple of words here and I want to make some distinctions. How is a jail different than say a detention center versus a corrections facility versus a prison? We have a lot of these terms here. And as you mentioned, I know that not all Sheriff's departments even have maybe a detention facility. So can you talk a little bit about what those various things are?
David Thaxton:Well, I'll tell you what. You know, I can't speak to across the nation, but I can only speak in general, in general. Okay. Across our nation in general, except I never been to a large United States city like New York or Chicago or LA. I know LA still runs their jails. So I'm not going to speak towards that, but the majority of the time, you've got cities that run their own little, little jails. Most of the time, the cities are smaller than the county. And cities with, you know, it's a processing place before a person is sent over to county. All right. Well, at least in the area where I'm from, we have, we have three cities encompassed in one county. But we have a total of about eight law enforcement agencies, which are police agencies to include the Sheriff's Office, which is a law enforcement agency. And so a jail, majority of the time is different from a prison. Jails and prisons are different. I don't care what anybody says. They call it all corrections. But I say, you know, in a jail, I'm just holding you based on the law. The law says you're charged with this. They've got enough probable cause to hold you. And yeah, you've got to go to court. All right. So with that being said, that's all I do is I just hold somebody there. And going back to the 90-10 rule, some of them people might be innocent. Believe it or not, there are people that are innocent. And just things are stacked up against them for whatever reason, you know? Well, my job is to ensure safety, safety of everybody in that facility. Doesn't matter. You walk in my jail, I'm in charge of your safety, okay? I enforce the law, the law and the regulations of the facility to ensure public safety. Somebody gets out and they're accused of murder, you know, they could kill again, you know? So it's my job to implement security. Prison, same thing, same situation to maintain the population, but they do it for years as opposed to the jail. I get people, they're on drugs, they're alcoholics, they're having some kind of mental breakdown. I'm getting them at their weakest, worst point in life, okay? They're so strung out, they're so angry, they're so whatever emotions may be going on, they're totally dealt out of their normal self, okay? Now, I'll hold them anywhere from, I don't know, four days on a city charge to 44 days on a county charge. Some people, their trial is not speedy at all, for whatever reasons, okay? And they may stay in the county jail for six months or longer. I recently had a jackass that he killed our deputies. That guy, horrible person. We had to deal with his ass for six years, you know? Six years. Anyway, it's a long story, a tragic story there. I don't need to talk about that one. But the point I'm getting at, 100% of everybody that comes through jails will leave. They'll either go back to the street on parole, innocent, or they'll go to prison, but they'll leave. So prison, on the other hand, by the time they get them, the majority of the time, I've got them all cleaned up. I've got them following orders. I've got them taking counseling. I've got some of them actually working in the kitchen and keeping the facility clean. Now, when they get to prison, this is where it's different. The officers do a similar thing, such as providing safety and security, because the criminal mind doesn't change just because you change a building. It's still going to do criminal activities. But their job is more about rehabilitation. So these people are sentenced for 3, 6, 15, 13 years, whatever. Life. They deal with this person every day for behavioral clarification. This person is also given opportunities to go and take educational class, court work. They can go to counseling, group therapy, all things that change their mentality. Do anything. Most jails in the United States don't do anything, geared towards rehabilitation at all. They're just not in jail long enough for us to worry about rehabilitation and trying to get a mind shift. The thing about it is punishment. You're not doing anything to change a person's mind, then they're not really being punished because they're not learning. They're staying the same. So that's the difference between a county jail and a prison is, we have limited resources for rehabilitation. We apply laws. People come to jail, they don't commit any more crimes. Oh yeah. If I was straight corrections, because Sheriff's Office derived their power from being a law enforcement authority under the state statutes. KDOC or DOC derived their authority from Department of Corrections. So if I was a straight correctional facility at the local level, most prisons are state and federal level, jails are municipal levels. If I was to be a straight corrections facility, well, I'm not protected by the state because I'm municipal. And who gives a to municipals to be corrections? I mean, maybe that's something I don't know, but that means every time there's a crime in the jail, I would have to call the local police department to come in and investigate it. But since we are a sheriff's office, we're law enforcement. We're not corrections. I'm holding you, I'm keeping the peace, and I'm applying the law. Everything I do is law enforcement. It's a triage center for law enforcement, the court system. It's not a correctional facility at all. And so in the book, I make that argument, you know, that stop calling correctional, stop calling local detention centers corrections, and stop treating it as if it's their civilians. When you call them civilians, people don't really take their job as serious as they should. You know, you've got a freaking badge on, and there's all kinds of criminality going in, in your jail. You need to be out there being proactive, and stopping whatever pending violence, or whatever criminal enterprise is going on, instead of sitting there acting like a damn babysitter. You know, babysitters are civilians. If you wear a badge, you should be considered a law enforcement officer. But I noticed that there was a... The state says police officers will receive this amount of training, state mandated. I'm sure the state does something for state correctional officers. But there's really nothing for detention officers, except for if the local sheriff says they want them to receive training. So when I started 20 years ago, I was in there for five days. One day was total orientation to work for the government, all your benefits, all the things you're expected to do, that kind of stuff. Two days was over basic duties on how to work in a jail. No constitutional reflection, no Section 1983, nothing like rules of confinement, none of that. Then I went out for the next two days. One day was defensive tactics and a whole day at the firing range. And then I got a badge and I was a deputy. I said, man, looking back at it, I said, Jesus, yeah, I could have did something real stupid, you know? And then jails have real high turnover, high, high turnover. Well, it's stressful. You're dealing with people that's trying to harm you. There's not a lot of people that can maintain that type of stamina to deal with that over a 30 year period, working in your local jail. I'm not saying all jails are like that. I mean, you really have to look at the, you know, locations or where they're at and people, because then if there was more ability to compare jails, but I know other guys that went on to be friends at other places and we'll chat and we'll have conversations and you know, they'll say, hear that violence, you know, or, or so there's no one size fits all to a detention center based on all the variables that are there, if that makes sense. Yeah.
Dylan Carnahan:David, I want to get into, you know, we kind of did the delineation on language, like what's a jail versus a prison, and talked about some of the finer details as like, you know, who operates those, right? You talk about as a sheriff's department. Can you talk a little bit about how a detention center operates? Again, I told you, we're keeping the peace, we're ensuring that, you know, the law isn't being broken. But is that, is that truly just having, you know, people committing crimes and having them in a cell and that's it? You know, what else is going on there?
David Thaxton:Well, this is where we have some similarities and where people call it corrections. I'm like, just because I give somebody medication doesn't mean I'm a doctor, you know? So just, just because I have to do this, well, it's the same constitution. So, you know, it's just everybody operates with the different, the different civil rights that we've got to implement it. We still pay attention to all of them, but we just emphasize on them a little in your different settings. But a local detention center, like I said, your job is to maintain the peace within it and not allow anyone to escape or anyone to be harmed. You do that in a lot of ways. We call it the six factors, health, welfare, custody, control, safety and security. Some people want to add on care. That's a whole other topic that I might write a book on. I mean, are you really caring or are you carrying out of obligations so that you don't get in trouble? There's some distinctions there. But when it comes to the, what do you call it? Safety, security, custody, control, health and welfare. That's the first thing. When somebody comes, the initial arrest, the police officer, when they bring them in, we're classifying them right off the bat. The classifications, that deals with custody and control. So you're arrested depending on what you're brought in on. Okay. You brought in on whatever charge it may be. So if it's a, you know, you've got property crimes, you've got personal crimes, you've got misdemeanors that could be property crimes. You've got misdemeanors that could be personal crimes. However, the misdemeanors are probably not going to stay. They're probably in and out charged. And then your felonies though, they're going to stay. And so what we have to do is we, as the classification unit, we have to look at that and say, okay, what is this person's charge? Then we look you up and find out your entire criminal history. Find out exactly what you're capable of. Cause past history behavior tells me what you're capable of doing. All right. And so that goes into custody level. Are you going to be minimum? Because the majority in a perfect world, you would have all civilians come in to do all your jail upkeep, like laundry, kitchen, run in your kitchen, keep the facility clean so that this way you can just keep the inmates locked down and in their pods where they're not moving all over the jail. Because when you allow them to have more autonomy to be able to look to, we used to call them trustees. When I became a classification sergeant, we went to inmate worker. The reason why is because you call somebody a trustee, you start thinking you could trust them. But going back to, like I said, even if they are a good person, they're probably being made to do stuff under duress by other inmates. So you can't trust any of them, man. So you've got to watch the situation. So you got to understand custody and control. But custody puts them on, we try to do minimum, medium, and maximum. Perfect world will have all minimum people, meaning all your people who can't pay traffic fines, all your people who still something under over, what is it, $15,000 or $1,000, but under $3,000, some minor property crime things. We'd probably have them only doing the maintenance. However, we've got people with serious histories, serious charges that come in there. We try to separate them out to where we have our lower minimum people actually do the facility keep up. Deputies, of course, supervise, provide the safety and security. Classification provides the custody and control, and then we contract with nurses to do health and, what is it? Do you remember? Health and welfare. I'm just messing with you. Just try to get you caught up.
Dylan Carnahan:I got help.
David Thaxton:We hire contracting health care companies to come in and run our clinic, and they're the ones that do all your medical needs. You know, like I said, we'll have people in there. You know, I had a population of 500 and something, and I would say 300 of them are on meds, some type of meds. At one point, half of those 300 people were on psychotropic meds, you know? So mental health is the jail.
Dylan Carnahan:This isn't just heart medication.
David Thaxton:Heart medicines?
Dylan Carnahan:I said, this isn't just heart medication.
David Thaxton:No, it's everything. It's everything. We, whatever the doctor says you are needing, yeah, we deal with them. So, like I said, we'll get people that maybe have comorbidity and where their addiction to crack cocaine, meth or something, but they also had schizophrenia. I tell you what, when these people come to jail on that type of mental health problem, Lord, it takes months and months. I've seen some guys be in their years before they get to sent to Larnard, which is a state mental health facility here in Kansas. Everybody's got to go there to be evaluated and to make sure they're on their proper meds or whatever. And man, those folks, but that's where it comes back into custody and control. We have certain levels for people to be on. Deputies provide everybody, contractors, nurses, maintenance, whatever. Whoever walks into that facility, that's a civilian, that's not an inmate, everybody's security orientated. You need to train everybody that comes into that facility about security orientation so that they can see signs of criminality so that they can report it and we can deal with it appropriately. But yeah, health and welfare, safety, security, custody, and control. That's how you operate the facility. You provide three meals a day, make sure the laundry is working, where people have clothes and uniforms and blankets, things like that. But that's how you try to keep it together.
Dylan Carnahan:So David, you know, I'm sure there are some difficult situations that arise just based upon the environment. And one of the things you talked about was inmates doing things under duress, right? We talked about the trustees in quotations here. So what are some of the difficult situations that can occur in one of these facilities?
David Thaxton:I'll tell you what. One of the biggest things is, one cool thing is when I was young, I wouldn't say super young, I was around 36 or something like that. But we had a turnover, we had a new sheriff come in, and he saw that our training division was lacking, and so he did a resume, and I resuméed for the training position, and I went and I told my boss at the time, the guy who told me I wasn't never going to be anything, that he was my boss at that time, and he comes in and says, hey, develop a 40-hour training week and present it to the sheriff on this date. I said, okay, well, put together a six-week program. I went and presented it. One, we're going to emphasize on the duties that we do, and the constitutionalities of why we do those duties. Right? But we also got to teamwork, you know, physical fitness. And then we also got to understand the bigger picture. Why are we doing the job that we're doing? We have a constitution for a reason. I've been in seven countries, you know, and most of them were Western countries, but the non-Western countries I've been in, man, I'm telling you right now, our constitution is pretty damn good. You know, it's pretty good. And so if you don't teach the deputies how, you need all three of those components so that you could be a professional or at least geared towards learning how to be a professional. And that's just the touch. Eight weeks, well, we were able to grow the jail training officer program from two weeks to eight weeks. So we end up getting our training set up for a total of 16 weeks before we allow the deputy to work by themselves in the pods. You know, but if that deputy's not being the damn leader in that pod, you've got these guys coming out. As I said earlier, some people that may come to jail may be good people. They just did something stupid, or for whatever, find themselves in jail, but they're going to learn a lesson. They may be the slim majority that learn a lesson from having their freedom taken. All right? But the majority of them in there, they never understood freedom in the first place. So what do they care? And so if that deputy's not up walking around, paying attention, being vigilant, ensuring that they're being proactive, talking, understanding, listening, finding out who's talking to who, why are they talking about, who's doing what, surprised checks on cleaners who walk the floors that are just monitored by cameras. If that deputy doesn't do that, then criminality will develop. You know, and one of the big things is the little things. I remember being a young deputy, it showed up to work. And it's funny, because all the inmates, they stare out the windows, right? Out there, sell windows to see who's coming in, shift change. And I'd walk in, motherfucker, I'm not coming out tonight, you know? They're shit talking on me. Fucking Deputy Do-Right, Billy fucking Goodman. I ain't even coming out tonight. And I say, good, it's going to save us all some problems. So I try to empower all the deputies that I end up leading. From once I became a sergeant, all the way up through my tenure or climb, then you have to be the leader here, but you have to lead within this parameter. Your new first name is Deputy, your new last name is your commission number, and your new way of culture is our policies. You know, I yell out, policy, policy, policy. So if you don't enforce the rules, man, you know, you've got to be proactive about it. Because if they just see you sitting around, they're going to do it. And so, I mean, now not all the time, you can be as proactive you want, but when there's a will, there's a way. You know, the darn inmates going to do something if they, if they get their mindset on it. It's just that you've got to be so on point throughout that 12 hour shift, you know, that you need to keep them guessing so that they don't do it on your shift. You know, but that's the thing. The job is really, it could be monotonous. You know, it's kind of like when I went to Iraq in 05, and I thank the Lord that I didn't have anything major to talk about. You know, we went on presence patrols, went in, found some bombs, you know, patrolled some outliers of Baghdad off a route Irish, things like that. Think the Lord, nothing bad happened. But at the same time, you know, you went out there every day, expected something. Well, it's kind of like the jail. You should be coming in every day, expecting something. And then at the end of the day, think the Lord that nothing went bad, you know. So the complacency, if that's where I come back to self-reflection. How much were you complacent during your shift that day? How could you do better the next day, tomorrow? You know, did you get in a conversation for way too long? Did you tell too much of your personal experience to an inmate? How, what did you do good and what did you do bad? So if we're not vigilant, complacency gets us hurt or could get other people hurt. And it's really hard to not do during a 12-hour period, you know, and then if people are working overtime. But yeah, I've seen major, major fights. You know, we had a problem, inmates trying to run stores, leaving their doors open, then they want to complain when somebody steals something out of there. And we have to treat it like it's a real crime, like, well, it is a real crime. Somebody got their item stole from them. We have to go do a whole report and run cameras and all kinds of things. And I get mad at the deputy. I say, you know what? If you would have just ensured that they were shutting their doors and using progressive discipline, my captain wouldn't be over here investigating this criminal activity now because you weren't proactive. You know, those type of things, fights. I've seen people run into other people's cells and get into a fist fight. And the aggressor, nine times out of ten, I see the aggressor go in there to start the fight. And the aggressor is the one that ends up having to go to the hospital. So, you know, it's just unreal the type of fights and the type of activity that can happen, you know. And if you, the reason why I talk about teamwork, man, you've got a jail where, I don't know, every jail's different, but my jail, approximately 40, 50 people, that's shift work, contractors, maintenance, whatever, are coming in and out of that jail all day long. Don't you think you should be nice to each other? Because you could bring contraband into these inmates, you know? I mean, it's happened, they make movies about stuff like that. I mean, I heard a bad story about what happened to the agency I worked for prior to me coming on. One of the deputies gave an inmate a key and he put it in his hair and was able to take his cuffs and everything off while he was in the van. And so he was convicted of murder and now he's going for sentencing, I guess, and he tries to fight the deputy, takes, tries to take his gun. Another cop end up shooting him, now he's in a wheelchair for the rest of his life in prison, but those things can happen in your local detention center if deputies are not properly trained. I think in my book, I challenge states if you do not have, because all the states have mandatory training for police officers. I believe there's mandatory training for state and federal prisons. But there's really nothing for local detention centers. Maybe there should be a little bit more oversight on local detention centers on what they're trained on. I'm not talking about these, I don't know whether you call them agencies, bodies of study, I don't know. Where, hey, send your deputy here for one week, and we'll train them up to speed for $540. No, it shouldn't be something like that. That should be states, all local jails have to pay for, or all municipalities have to pay for their jail. I don't know how that money twists, because I never learned the budget side of the fact. But I don't know how that money trickles down from the state to local municipalities when it comes to jails. But I think your detention officer should be just as much trained as your police officer because they're enforcing the same constitution. You're just doing it differently. A crime is a crime. It doesn't matter where it happens. A crime is a crime. So why aren't local detention centers considered law enforcement and not? Because I'll tell you what. I think, sure, I learned good things from like National Jail Academy as far as running a jail. But the basic line staff, I think I learned better at going to local or Kelly TC, Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center because of their constitutionality courses that they taught. How to apply that to a detention that I learned any of the 40-hour basic classes I ever went to. Does that make sense? I don't know if it does. But yeah, a lot of people don't like hearing that there's, here and there, I think they're the same. I mean, the job's pretty much the same. You're enforcing the law, didn't matter. You know, I see cops working all the time off duty at a library. Okay. So you're sitting off duty at a library. What makes that any more prestigious than working at a detention center? You know, besides the library is a lot more common. People are less likely to be crazy there versus a jail. But I think a jail is more prestigious because you're dealing with people for days, months and even years more than at their worst point. PD deals with them for up to a couple hours before they go to jail. I get them lined out and then they go to prison and they get a fairly stable individual the majority of time.
Dylan Carnahan:David, you know, there's a lot of good things there and I appreciate you sharing maybe some of those grim situations that occur. I do that not, I think that's good not to be ghoulish but just to show the actual consequences of not performing those job duties appropriately as to what could happen. So I do appreciate you delving into that. Something I want to cover is we kind of laid a good foundation of what's what's going on at a jail, you know, who's involved, how how things are processed. I just want to give you some time to answer this. What can the system do better?
David Thaxton:You know what? So I don't know what, let me, let me refresh my memory or something. I think it is. Okay. Let me pull up this. What I believe the system could do better. All right. So in my book, from chapter seven to nine, that's where I really kind of lay out what can happen, what we can do. And then being raised in the poor community, I was raised on section eight. We moved every year. I don't know why every year, but we did. In every little poor neighborhood of Kansas City area from Missouri to KCK. And I see trauma after trauma after trauma, you know, you don't, it's almost as if society is always asking the government to do what the individual family should be doing. Your father should teach you discipline. Your mother should teach you discipline. Everybody should teach each other how to live with morals and good character, you know, how to treat one another better. But that's the thing. And I don't mean, I'm not saying all poor people, I was poor. And so, yeah, we had some antisocial beliefs and some criminal activity in my family. But at the same time, we had some morals and some understanding about basic decency, you know, and that's where a lot of the rub comes in. Nobody wants to talk about the lack of character we're having. But, and then everybody wants to side-chair it and say it's a race problem, it's a gender problem, it's this and that. And it's just like, no, it's just a people problem, okay? It's a people problem. I mean, most of the time when you come to jail, you either come to jail because you're addicted to something, so you commit a crime to go get that something or because you're on that something, you know, some type of substance, or you've got a real mental health problem where your diodes aren't connecting appropriately, and you're seeing all kinds of crazy things, and you do something, you know, that's a crime or to an argument, and you beat somebody up so bad that you've got some trouble that you're not really dealing with here, you know? So where does that get fixed? And that's where I think, you know, the first book kind of lays it out. I say in the jail, we should run low intelligence units in all jails. A jail intelligence officer that kind of helps applications, see this person for who they are, what they've done, and where they could go. But really, just monitor them while they're in the detention center. Because they're so, I remember back when I was classification, one of the old chiefs of the cities around here said, we don't have a gang problem in my city. Well, I work for the county, and I'll tell you what, we'll go through the jail cells, and I'll show you the gang problem, because it's written all over the damn walls, all the gangs that's in KCK is on my walls in the jail. That's the reason why I have to go through there and paint them every so often, and because of deputy vigilance. But we could do something a little better by implementing that jail intelligence officer. I believe if you're a gangbanger and you commit a personal felony crime, and you're found to be a gangbanger, I believe the intelligence officer could give that information to the detective or court system to raise that person's bail. That's the thing. I've been watching people come to jail. There was points during my career where I've seen grandfather, father, and son all in jail at the same time. I'm like, dude, you guys are just repeating the cycle, man. It's like you're actually thinking it's okay to come to jail. It's not okay to come to jail. It's not okay to raise your kids to think that jail is just a normal process of life. That's ridiculous. So you see that and you think to yourself, okay, there's a couple of things that I could do as an officer. One, I do know that I watch them. They start off minor crimes. Minor crimes keep building. Medium crimes, felonies, and then they keep getting felonies, but they never go to prison until finally, they do something serious and now they go to prison. So just think of how many times we allow other individuals out there, whether they were stealing, I don't care, they're stealing, you're still hurting somebody who worked for something, or they violently attacked somebody, or whatever the case may be. The point of it is, how many times did they come to jail? I get the three strike rules. Well, it's really hard because there's a lot of variables there to dissect, so to speak. The portion of it is, if I could keep them in jail longer, say you're a gang banger and I identify you as a gang banger, you just did a drive-by, so your bond was this, well, now I get to talk to the judge and raise it higher. Now I get to keep this just a little bit longer if they're not convicted, but at least we prolong the criminality that's going to come from them being out again. All right. Then the second portion of that is, what if I had a cognitive deputy, call it a cognitive behavior deputy. I've got a master's in organizational psychology. I did not want to do individual, my mother had schizophrenia, so I was raised with that, and then working in a jail, seeing all the different types of mental health issues. I didn't want to sit there and deal with people with true issues. I did organizational psychology, and that's where you're looking at systems, and seeing how the systems reach other. I thought to myself, I'm sorry, the majority of the people that come to jail, people. It's poor people who come to jail. You don't see a lot of suburban kids coming to jail. You don't see a lot of affluent people coming to jail. It's poor people, kids starting off with stealing cars, doing silly stuff, doing some drugs, and the next thing you know, it builds and builds until it's a... Well, I say, what if I can instill a cognitive deputy? This deputy doesn't need a therapist. It's just somebody who does a group conversation, but they go a little deeper. They work with the intel deputy in classifications. They can turn around and look at these people and find out, okay, are they presumptive? Presumptive parole, presumptive prison, whatever it is. We've got tablets in the jail now. There's all kinds of things you can implement onto the tablets. What if this deputy was to be a liaison with the jail, intel, the classifications, and the community and court systems? Deputy was able to say, okay, we've got the civic groups that come in to teach soft skills. Dayton, this time, you're going to do this. Or these are the assignments on the tablets. I need you to do this. You know, and they just, they do short little spurts, hour, two hours, you know, because like I said, oh, six months, maybe, you know, four to 42 days. So I've got to gear my thought process towards short stays. You're not going to get a 16 week program from here, because we're not a prison. But what you're going to get is, it's planet. We're going to plant seeds in your brain so that you can see how things really work. For instance, I did once I got my psychology degree, my bachelor degree, I said, well, let's try out some knowledge that I thought I knew. Right? And as a lieutenant, I said, especially working Sunday through Monday. Now the volume intake was not that bad. You know, and I don't know what it is. I think it's, I'll have to check with some of my colleagues, but there's a psychological phenomenon I watched over the 20 years of my facility. So Sunday through Wednesday, it's a lot slower. But Wednesday through Saturday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, most of the time Friday and Saturday, that's when everybody comes to jail, Friday and Saturday. But one of the things I also noticed is that even people that's been in the jail for months, they tend to act more crazy on Friday and Saturday nights. It's like, I think it's just because they've had programming into them, getting wild on the weekends. If you look at that, most people, that's how their flow works. What we're trying to do in a jail is, whatever habits that they've got, try to plant seeds for them to see that habit, just to see it, and then give them resources. If you go to prison, you need to get involved in these things. If you go to the street, this is the civic group that's in your neighborhood. This is the clergy group that's in your neighborhood. Because a lot of folks, if they don't have a support system, or if their support system is anti-social, what chance do they really have to make a change if they don't have a point of reference? I'm not saying, yeah, there are super, super bad criminals out there. And yeah, I'll throw the book at them. And yeah, we could have serious conversations about them. But when it comes to the run of the mill people, what if we tried to break the cycle before it became a cycle? What if you did get them involved into something? What if you were able to plant seeds? What if you were to change it? And so, this deputy, you know, when I was a lieutenant, I used to bring those inmates in. And I would have conversations about cognitive behavior. You know, here's the event. Here's your feelings. Here's your thoughts. Here's your behavior. Well, in between your thoughts and behavior, that's when you control the situation. That's when you could get stronger. You know, I'm looking at these guys, they were no different than I was back when I was younger. At least thought process, yeah, older. But it was the same, I'm sorry, it's anti-social, poor people mentality. You don't know because you're not exposed. If you run around the same six block neighborhood, what are you going to know? What are you going to know? If you have the same six friends that know the same thing that you know, what are you going to know? How are you going to make better decisions if you don't see anything? So I told the guys, I was talking about the legends. When we got the legends here, we had four nightclubs. Then I think within us, there was like three murders. So they said, one of the guys were like, they said, why are them all the mother f-ing cops up there? I said, man, it's the land of the milk and honey. What do you mean? I said, listen, it's called commerce. You know what commerce means? And then I walked them through and I said, you know what it's trying to do is when you put in commerce, that means you have jobs, that means you have skills, that means people have an opportunity to earn more and be more. But if you don't have that, then you have nothing. So if you don't understand resources, that's another thing I found out that these guys, donors, they don't understand resources and how to use them and take advantage of them, or how to go places. Because their environment doesn't expose them. What kills me is everybody's walking around with a library in their pocket now, but they don't even know how to use the damn thing for education. It's proven that on social media, negative things get more clicks than positive things. And so my way is your local jails need to start infusing more positive behavior, implementation. Most of the time, we focus on progressive punitive. Well, not all these people are in jail are being punished yet. They're just being detained because they can't afford bail to get more, they're stuck, and now they're exposed to even more negative behavior. So how can we make more positive? Sure, we're going to enforce all the facility rules correctly, but how can we do it in a more positive type way? And then how can you engage inmates a little bit more? And so the biggest thing is for me is what we can do better is make the jail, of course, firm, fair, firm and consistent. Make it to where it's not comfortable. Make it to where you have to mandatory learn something, you know? Sorry, you got locked up, man. I'm not saying you got to take classes to get out of jail, but make it to where it's so damn boring that taking classes would be an adventure. You know what I mean? Make it to where you don't get a whole lot of entertainment. Make it to where you don't get to... Because why do I have to afford six hours of them out of their cell for them to hang out and talk about how to sell the Knicks' freaking criminal activity? Why can't they be held a little bit more accountable to where they're provided more opportunities to educate themselves in the local jail? Give them their hour out in the morning that the Supreme Court says, I have to give them out for health reasons. And then after that, any other time you want to come out of your cell, you have to be involved in whatever program that may be going on. Now, a lot of jails can't do it that way. And so my next book, you'll have to wait for it. The next book will actually give you my own philosophy. So this book right here, it tells about the bigger picture about what we've kind of talked about today. But the second book is my very own philosophy on how to run a jail. It will be called the Arena's Code, you know, because I think instead of just training deputies solely for law enforcement, inadvertently in what we're doing, sure, we show them progressive discipline, which police officers don't have to do that. Where we differ and that's where they try to say we're corrections, but we're more law enforcement than we're actually corrections. Because the people in jail are in your local jails. Out of the 500 people I could house in my jail, 5% of them were convicted in either they're doing six months county time or they're getting ready to be shipped off to prison. So 95% of the people in jail are not found guilty yet. You can't correct anybody that's not guilty. That's another major point of why a jail is not. But anyways, the second book will talk about how a deputy could intervene by being, if the deputy is trained to say, they can actually intervene and start teaching people better ways to do things instead of just saying, me cup, you do. Does that make sense?
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, no, it definitely does. David, I want to thank you, sir, for the time that you've served your community and the work that you've done, and thank you for sharing your time and knowledge today.
David Thaxton:Well, thanks, buddy. I appreciate you giving me time to talk about it. I mean, it's a thankless world, and so when you get to hear people tell you, hey, good job, you feel like you did something. The front of the book, I dedicated it to my children because, man, construction, I worked 12s. I started at the Sheriff's Office, I think I made 10 bucks an hour for a family of five, and my ex didn't work, and so I lived at work. I lived in turmoil just to pay the bills, and things got better as they went on. But no, I really talk about how it takes a toll on people, and so going back, if you want to do it, just remember, you've got to pay attention to who you want to be, and count your blessings, man. Don't live in the storm.
Dylan Carnahan:Well said.
David Thaxton:But thank you. I appreciate it, buddy.
Dylan Carnahan:That wraps up our conversation with David. We talked about how criminality needs to be proactively handled in jails, the evolution and training methodology for law enforcement, and the need for the constructive use of an inmate's time. Go to this episode's show notes to see any resources David mentioned during our episode. Lastly, subscribe to the Simple Questions Podcast to get notified when our latest episodes are released. Thank you for listening, and remember to keep asking questions.