Corrections Lieutenant

About the role

The Corrections Lieutenant serves as the Shift Commander, maintaining absolute oversight of daily facility operations, safety, and security. This critical leadership role coordinates institutional services with medical, behavioral health, and administrative units to ensure operational continuity.

Responsibilities

• Daily Oversight: Serve as Shift Commander with complete operational authority over facility safety, security, and administrative functions during assigned shifts.
• Interdepartmental Liaison: Coordinate directly with medical, mental health, and program staff to facilitate required treatments and ensure secure offender access.
• Shift Handover: Collaborate with incoming and outgoing shift commanders to provide seamless operational transitions, comprehensive shift briefings, and intelligence sharing.
• Logistics & Records: Maintain meticulous, legally defensible daily institutional logs, incident reports, and operational records in compliance with DOC documentation standards.
• Resource Allocation & Staff Supervision: Manage, allocate, and adjust personnel schedules across all posts to maintain mandatory staffing levels and minimize unnecessary overtime.
• Post Inspections: Conduct continuous physical inspections of all facility posts to verify staff alertness, compliance with post orders, and proper equipment operation.
• Mentorship & Development: Act as a proactive mentor to both probationary and tenured staff, modeling professional boundaries and high ethical standards.
• Performance Management: Evaluate subordinate staff through formal performance appraisals, conduct daily shift briefings, deliver policy updates, and manage leave requests.
• Discipline & Grievances: Resolve internal staff conflicts, conduct initial investigations into policy violations, and recommend formal disciplinary actions when necessary.
• Security, Tactical Operations & Emergency Management: Assume the role of Initial Incident Commander during critical incidents, managing responses to medical emergencies, riots, fires, escapes, or natural disasters until relieved by higher authority.
• Tactical Readiness: Authorize emergency protocols, initiate unannounced tactical drills, and evaluate staff performance during simulated crisis scenarios.
• Contraband Suppression: Oversee Point of Entry (POE) metal detector screenings, coordinate comprehensive canine or manual searches of offender housing, and manage the chain of custody for confiscated contraband.
• Security Audits: Direct routine inspections of physical security structures, including locks, barriers, windows, perimeter fences, and electronic surveillance systems.
• Offender Management & Institutional Justice: Direct and monitor all offender movement within the facility, including high-risk transports, recreation, transfers, and medical lines.
• Accountability Metrics: Authorize and verify official facility offender counts, investigating any discrepancies immediately.
• Admissions & Releases: Oversee the intake of new admissions and verify the absolute accuracy of release or discharge paperwork to prevent improper releases.
• Administrative Hearings: Serve as an objective Disciplinary Hearing Officer when designated, reviewing evidence and rendering decisions on offender rule violations.
• De-escalation: Arbitrate high-tension disputes between offenders or between staff and offenders, utilizing verbal de-escalation techniques to maintain institutional order.

Requirements

• Standard Track: Three (3) years of progressively responsible corrections experience in a secure facility working directly with offenders. This must include at least one (1) year of active supervisory experience at the rank of Sergeant or higher, with documented oversight of correctional personnel.
• Educational Track: A combination of relevant post-secondary education (Criminal Justice, Social Work, Sociology, Psychology, or a closely related behavioral science field) and direct corrections experience totaling three (3) years.

Qualifications

• Active, direct service delivery within a secure environment to clients detained against their will. Qualifying fields include custody and control, institutional education, correctional social work, medical/nursing services, large-scale food service, or general facility maintenance.
• Experience supervising offenders within correctional industries or specialized program implementations is also qualifying.
• Candidates must demonstrate prior authority in executing complex operational components, such as conducting classification hearings, participating in Institutional Classification Committees (ICC), leading multi-disciplinary staffing, and vetting formal offender grievances.

Skills

• Advanced Knowledge of: Comprehensive DOC policies, institutional operating procedures, state statutes, and constitutional law regarding offender rights.
• Modern penological principles, practices, and physical security methods required to control a diverse offender population safely.
• Offender psychology, behavioral patterns, indicators of radicalization, and institutional subcultures.
• Advanced supervisory techniques, progressive discipline philosophies, and strategic workforce management.
• The formal Use of Force Policy, tactical communication, and the physical force continuum.

Benefits

• $0 premium employee health insurance option plus eleven paid holidays, generous vacation and sick leave accrual, dental, vision, and other insurance options, and retirement benefits.

Pay

• $30.00 to $33.00 per hour, depending on experience.

Schedule

• Rotating schedule, including 12-hour shifts, days, evenings, nights, weekends, and holidays.