WITNESS
Dora Schriro was named Director of the Arizona Department of Corrections in 2003. Dr. Schriro has served in the public sector for more than 30 years. She began her career in corrections in Massachusetts in 1974. In 1984, she was selected to serve in New York City's Office of the Coordinator of Criminal Justice. In 1985, she became Assistant Commissioner for the New York City Department of Correction. From 1989 to 1993 she was the Superintendent of the Medium Security Institution in St. Louis City. Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan appointed her Director of the Missouri Department of Corrections in 1993, a position in which she served until 2001. Prior to her appointment in Arizona, Dr. Schriro served as Commissioner of the Division of Corrections for the City of St. Louis.
Dr. Schriro is distinguished as St. Louis' first female warden and the first female director of the prison systems in Arizona and Missouri. She is also on the editorial boards of Crime and Justice and Corrections Management Quarterly. She was Vice Chair of the Missouri Sentencing Advisory Committee from 1994 to 2001, sat on the Executive Committee of the Association of State Correctional Administrators and was Chair of the Association's Victims Committee for a number of years. She is a certified social worker and educator and lectures and publishes regularly in the field of corrections. Her recent writings concern Parallel Universe, an institution-based approach to re-entry.
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STATEMENT
Our success is sustained with answers emanating from excellent employees who are joined by the crime victims' community and the inmate population, both of which, each from its own perspective, are especially vested in the department's success. Bringing together unlikely teams to envision what our agency could become and winning over diverse stakeholders, we took a comprehensive approach and collectively fixed on the notion of attaining flagship status setting priorities and producing important and measurable results that improve public safety now and later. Our flagship needed a flag and the flag needed a succinct statement about our work. We adopted: Striving towards Excellence.
The teams grew in number and size, eventually encompassing the ten prison complexes and the department's other work units. More stakeholders were sought out and crime victims, inmate advocates, the business and law enforcement communities responded and continue to contribute today. This greater group of correctional leaders — not a bureaucrat among them — created a roadmap, our strategic plan, its performance objectives now updated annually by an ever increasing statewide assembly of ADC and community partners. The Arizona Plan was ambitious, is ambitious. It had risks, and has rewards. Sacred cows have come down; evidence-based practices are taking their place, outcome measures selected, uniformly defined and routinely tracked. Outcomes are published and successes celebrated. Outcomes are also regularly reported to the legislature, the judiciary and the press. The news is mostly good and consistently positive. Arizona isn't surprised anymore by our progress. The State is proud of our progress.
Excerpted from a written statement submitted to the Commission
Download the complete written statement
Note: Some witnesses submitted documents in addition to the written statement they prepared for the hearing. In most cases, those documents are not available on the Commission's web site.
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