‘He seems genuine’: Potential Allegheny County jail warden draws praise from skeptics
Share this post:
Trevor Wingard was serving as the superintendent at SCI Somerset in January 2017 when he learned his prison had been chosen by the state secretary for a two-day meeting of corrections leaders from across Pennsylvania.
Although the training schedule was aggressive, Wingard was given a one-hour window to show off his facility.
Wingard chose to have a man who had been imprisoned for 25 years speak to the group.
Incarcerated at age 14, the man had barely spoken for the first 20 years.
“He didn’t want to talk to anybody,” Wingard said. “He only spoke if spoken to.”
But in the last few years, the man’s whole life had changed.
“Being at that facility, based on the things we ushered in, it completely changed the human being,” Wingard said.
The man had become a mentor to others. He volunteered in the mural program. He trained a service dog.
Later, he volunteered in a hospice program.
“Listening to him talk for an hour to all the leaders in the state was probably the proudest moment of my career,” Wingard said on Tuesday during an hour-long interview with TribLive.
Now, eight years later, Wingard hopes to embark on a new phase of that career — as warden of the Allegheny County Jail.
The Jail Oversight Board is expected to vote on Wingard’s nomination by Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato at its meeting on Thursday.
Bethany Hallam, an outspoken member of the Jail Oversight Board who served on the search committee, has met with Wingard twice in recent days as he became a finalist for the position.
When she first reviewed his resume, she said, Hallam was skeptical of his traditional, 28-year corrections career.
“We wanted something radically different from what we had — radically different from the stereotypical jail warden,” she said. “He’s not that.”
But, she continued, “He is a very qualified, competent person. You can tell this is his life. He, uniquely, is aware of and prepared for the challenges he’s walking into.”
Taking on a new challenge
Wingard, 55, of Somerset, retired in 2022 as deputy secretary of corrections for the western region.
He oversaw nine prisons across Western Pennsylvania — a job that former Corrections Secretary John Wetzel said is a lot of responsibility.
“He thrived in that.”
Wingard served in that position for five years before retiring, he said, to spend more time with his family.
But he and his wife have become empty nesters, and he said, he misses working inside a corrections facility.
Adding to his decision to apply, about 15 years ago, Wingard served as interim warden at the jail. Although he was only there for seven months and unable to implement wide-spread, lasting changes, he said he thinks he can now make a difference there.
Wingard has been watching the Jail Oversight Board meetings for years — and understands the strained dynamics among the members and former Warden Orlando Harper. He is also aware of the ongoing litigation the county has faced because of issues at the jail — the use of excessive force, a lack of medical and mental health care, understaffing.
“I’ve never been someone who hesitates at taking on those challenges,” Wingard said. “As someone in the positions I held with the department, the challenges were plentiful. They were daily. They were short term. They were long term. And they were never something that I avoided.”
So when the Allegheny County Jail position opened up, Wingard thought he should apply — especially given how much more leadership experience he has since the last time he was in the Second Avenue facility.
“I think there’s an opportunity to be there long-term and work on these issues,” he said.
Complications of running a jail
When Wetzel became the state corrections secretary in 2011, he quickly set out to identify staff across Pennsylvania who were what he calls “thinkers” — people who could help create policies and procedures to empower those in the field.
“Trevor met that criteria for me.”
Wetzel sent Wingard to Allegheny County Jail to serve as interim warden in 2011.
He knew Wingard could help stabilize the facility.
Running a jail, Wetzel said, is one of the most complicated jobs in government. A warden has to be an expert in corrections operations, medical care, staffing, human resources and more.
And, Wetzel said, it’s even more political now.
But Wingard, whose career has included stints as a deputy superintendent at SCI Greensburg and later superintendent at SCI Somerset and SCI Laurel Highlands, which serves as a medical care facility, has extensive experience in all those things.
“Trevor became a national thought leader in corrections,” Wetzel said. “He did some really ground-breaking stuff.”
While at SCI Somerset, Wingard oversaw the implementation of the mural program and service dog program. He also helped to implement the Swift, Certain & Fair model for disciplinary issues at the prison.
The program was so successful in its pilot phase that it was extended to other facilities across the state, Wetzel said.
Wetzel, who served on the Allegheny County warden search committee, thinks Wingard is a great choice to lead the jail.
Wingard understands that corrections, nationally, faces a staffing crisis, Wetzel said. More people are entering county jails with an array of health problems — addiction, mental illness and inadequate health care — which increases the strain on staff.
“It makes sense to have someone with a lot of correctional experience,” Wetzel said. “The county is smart to consider someone with that experience. They’d be hard-pressed to find someone with that level of skill and nuance.”
In the last several years, Wetzel said, he’s seen a shift at the Allegheny County Jail.
“Not that ACJ was ever a soft touch, but it didn’t have a perception of punitiveness,” Wetzel said.
But that changed under the previous administration. There was a shift to a more punitive approach to corrections that was in conflict with the community, he said.
Now, Wetzel said, under the Innamorato administration, there’s a will to change that for the residents of the jail and the staff.
“They both need the same thing — they need professionalism and a culture that supports health.”
Wetzel said the Allegheny County Jail is one of the most complicated facilities in the state.
For the new warden to have success, he continued, there needs to be trust — from the community, the staff and the oversight board.
“You have to stabilize operations. And you have to get to stable leadership,” Wetzel said.
Wingard believes the basis for success is having a secure facility for everyone — the people who work there, live there and the community.
Once the jail is secure and operating smoothly, programming and treatment follow, he said.
“I do not feel like any jail needs to be a warehouse,” Wingard said. “If we’re going to have citizens from the county come in to a facility, when they leave, they need to be better than what they came as. That’s good for all stakeholders.”
‘He seems like a good pick’
Tanisha Long, a community organizer with the Abolitionist Law Center, on Monday went into her first meeting with Wingard, a 28-year corrections veteran, with reservations.
“I left there feeling a lot better than I did when I went into the room,” she said. “He seems like a good pick.”
Wingard has a long history of working with people with health issues, and he was receptive to the questions the activists asked, she said.
Long was pleased to hear that Wingard said he wants to decrease the jail population and that he is committed to increasing programming.
“I don’t think anybody leaves there better if they don’t have any opportunities,” she said.
Long also praised Wingard’s work with the service dogs and murals programs,
“Both of those things point to me that he appears to care about the person as a whole,” Long said.
Wingard was also open to ideas like increasing visitation and implementing a young mentorship program, she said.
“‘I believe we should try everything at least once,’” he told their meeting.
Hallam said she was pleased to hear Wingard say he was committed to fixing intake at the jail. That’s the place, she said, where problems like overdoses and deaths often arise.
Both Long and Hallam were also impressed at his depth of knowledge about the jail, including watching the oversight board meetings.
“That does show investment before getting the job,” Long said. “I would love to have a relationship where the person in charge of all the people I care about is equally as invested as me.
“We are approaching that opportunity if he is who he says he is.”
Hallam, noted particularly, that Wingard spoke unprompted about the disrespectful tone from jail administration to the board in years past, as well as how administrators seemed to undermine the board and the work it does.
She thinks that bodes well for their continuing work.
“I’ve never had a warden on the same team as me,” Hallam said. “He seems genuine. He seems to care about the things I care about.”
Wingard has already given board members his cell phone number and talked about forging a strong relationship with them.
But that doesn’t mean forgetting the past history, he said.
“Because honestly, at the end of all this, if we’re not sending people out of the ACJ better than what we brought them in there as, that’s not our shared vision,” Wingard said. “We’re failing Allegheny County in general.”
Hallam’s one criticism, she said, is that Wingard has not spent any time — other than seven months at ACJ — working in a county jail.
“The population is very different,” she said. “Programmatic opportunities are different because the population is so transient.”
Some people are only there for a few days, or weeks.
But Wingard acknowledged that.
“I think from the minute they get to the front door, we need to be encouraging them for their eventual release and to make them better through programming,” he said. “So it may be more condensed in there, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be just as effective.”
Both Hallam and Long said they thought that the process for hiring a new warden was flawed and that the search committee was not properly utilized — including that they only got to interview the two finalists for the position.
“That doesn’t make sense to me,” Long said. “I was not a fan of how the process played out. But I do think we at least arrived at a candidate who appears to be interested in making a positive change at the ACJ.
“Hopefully.”