The second VCSO Jail Academy

This week concluded our second jail academy here at the VCSO. We decided to put together an academy in 2017 to help provide a base of training that has been lacking overall in the jail industry. Because there are no state requirements for detention officers and it is left up to each Sheriff to set their own standards for training, we developed the Vernon County Jail Academy. We immediately saw a significant difference in turnover and performance of jail staff after hosting our first academy. With only one detention officer moving out of state and two others being promoted to other positions within the Sheriff’s Office, we did not even have enough openings to hold a second academy but did not want the few new people we hired to miss out on the training. We sent out information about our academy to area agencies and quickly got a response. We would have 6-additional people sent to our academy from outside our agency, giving us enough students to host it.

I spent some time speaking to other Sheriffs about the change we had seen in our staff after attending a jail academy and found they also have the same training issue. When a new person is hired to work in a jail, they learn by doing the actual job with little to no training beforehand. The first time they handcuff a person is when they handcuff an inmate. They learn how to write incident reports by writing the real reports, and they learn state laws regarding county jails as they go. With our second academy, we have again seen very positive changes in the students and received great feedback from them as well. With over 13 different instructors taking the time to teach classes in their respective fields, the students received classroom and hands-on training in restraint devices, report writing, medical training, Missouri law regarding jails and detention officers and much more. This also gives the students the ability to have group discussions regarding different topics and scenarios covered in class. I feel the more training they can receive before they start in the jail, the more successful each student will be. But the jail academy is not the only training we have focused on for the detention officers. After they complete our academy, they are assigned to an instructor in the jail who they report to during their field training time. This gives the new detention officers the chance to take what they have learned in the jail academy and perform the real job with an experienced person there with them. By the time they have finished their field training, they will have received a minimum of 6 weeks of training before they work on their own. My hope is that we can set a standard of training that others will follow to help provide well-trained people who help protect our communities as Detention Officers in the county jail.