Joseph Sabino Mistick: John Wetzel taking his common sense on the road

John Wetzel was the warden of a small jail in Franklin County when he was nominated by Gov. Tom Corbett to become the commonwealth’s secretary of corrections. Wetzel, a former offensive lineman for Bloomsburg University, had started as a part-time corrections officer 20 years earlier, and he was ready for the big job by 2011.

It seems that there is always a place in government for someone who speaks plain common sense to power, and Wetzel did that even though it did not always go down well. Politicians will fight for the jobs and economic benefits that come from having a prison in their districts, but those pressures never changed him.

His first decision was to stop construction of a new prison that was announced and ready to go. Then he had a couple of dustups with two powerful state senators — one Republican and one Democrat — when he recommended closing two existing prisons.

“Those decisions are about the numbers, not politics. If you are going to reduce the prison population, it makes no sense to build or fund more cells,” Wetzel says.

As he had done in Franklin County, he oversaw a substantial reduction of the prison population in Pennsylvania, from 51,700 in 2012 to 37,000 when he retired as secretary Oct. 1. And he made Pennsylvania a place to watch for corrections reform.

Anyone who thinks of “The Shawshank Redemption” or “Cool Hand Luke” when they imagine what the people who run our jails and prisons are like has some catching up to do.

As Wetzel says, “We have to focus on the problems people have before they get into the system.”

A longtime advocate for universal prekindergarten for Pennsylvania’s children, Wetzel says, “What we know is that kids who are reading by the third grade and doing math by the fourth grade don’t drop out of school. And Black kids across the country who drop out have a devastating incarceration rate.”

Behavioral health is another key to reform. “We need a better-informed approach to mental illness. Thirty-three percent of those who are incarcerated with the Department of Corrections have a mental illness diagnosis,” Wetzel says.

“When somebody slips through a crack in the social safety net, they land in a jail cell,” he says. “We have to spot these problems earlier and get people the help they need short of prison.”

And he supports universal nurse-family partnerships that provide professional in-home support for families of newborns and preschool children that are facing otherwise insurmountable social or economic hurdles.

First appointed by a Republican governor and reappointed by his Democratic successor, Wetzel turned down other offers over the years because he wanted to finish his work here. Now, through his nonprofit, he can spread his message beyond Pennsylvania.

“This is the time for reform,” he says. “Finally, there is a broad recognition that what we do in criminal justice is not good enough, and government works best when there is a lot of attention on a problem.

“Part of it is growing resistance to the high cost of locking people up, but there is also an understanding that we must do better for our people, that we must try harder for them.”

That’s just common sense.