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The Prison Officer Podcast
The Prison Officer Podcast is a place where prison officers and correctional staff share their experiences, discuss leadership, cope with stress, and learn survival strategies for one of the toughest careers out there. Hosted by Michael Cantrell, this podcast delves into the lives, dreams, and challenges faced by those who work inside the walls of our nation’s prisons. It features interviews, insights, and discussions related to the unique and demanding world of corrections. Whether it’s overcoming difficult leaders, understanding rehabilitation, or addressing misconceptions about incarcerated populations, the Prison Officer Podcast provides valuable perspectives from professionals in the field.
The Prison Officer Podcast
104: Recent Training Spotlight - and A Special Announcement by Michael Cantrell
Michael Cantrell returns with a passionate exploration of the evolving corrections landscape, sharing significant professional milestones while introducing his upcoming new book, "Power Skills: Emotional Intelligence and Soft Skills for Correctional Officers, Public Service, and Beyond."
The episode begins with exciting news about Cantrell's appointment to the Advisory Board on Corrections for the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association (ILEETA). This significant development represents a deliberate effort to bring corrections expertise into an organization that has traditionally focused on law enforcement training. Through panel discussions and networking at the ILEETA conference, Cantrell helped identify critical training needs in corrections, including leadership and Correctional Training Officer (CTO) development, specifically designed for correctional environments and based on a new CTE (Coach - Train - Evaluate).
At the heart of this episode is Cantrell's compelling discussion of his upcoming book on emotional intelligence and soft skills. He shares how his perspective transformed after hearing these capabilities described as "superpowers" rather than merely empathetic exercises. Through personal stories and practical examples, Cantrell breaks down the four components of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.
Cantrell challenges listeners to recognize that every correctional officer is a leader who can positively influence workplace culture. He emphasizes that communication significantly impacts perceptions of professionalism, whether through face-to-face interactions, emails, or other channels.
Ready to transform your effectiveness as a corrections professional? Listen now to discover the "Power Skills" that can elevate your career and improve workplace culture.
Keys to Your New Career: Information and Guidance to Get Hired and Be Successful as a Correctional or Detention Officer by Michael Cantrell
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OMNI
OMNI is cutting-edge software designed to track inmates and assets within your prison or jail.
Command Presence
Bringing prisons and jails the training they deserve!
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Take care of each other and Be Safe behind those walls and fences!
Well, hello and welcome back to the Prison Officer Podcast. My name is Mike Cantrell. I'm glad you've come back and joined us, got a lot of stuff to cover today. I've been doing a bunch of stuff and I want to share it with you. A lot of it has to do with things that are happening in corrections, big improvements, things I'm excited to be part of. So I'm going to go through a whole list of stuff and we will discuss each one of them.
Speaker 1:The first thing I want to start off with, of course, is pepperball, and I want to thank pepperball. I think they've been our sponsor here for more than three years, so they're what keeps the lights on and keep the podcast going and I I appreciate their sponsorship. Uh, if you get the chance, I know the pepperball is going to be out at the mock riot in moundsville, west virginia, may 5th through 7th. So if you're out there, you get the chance to go visit the the mock riot. Go say hi to ronnie and sharon. They're they're the ones that set up the mock riot for everyone and keep it going, and we're very happy to know them. But pepperball will have a booth set up and uh, so stop by the booth and talk to carl I think will's going out there, maybe, joe and stop by and talk to them and thank them for sponsoring the podcast. I would appreciate that if you would mention it to them. So if you get the chance, stop by and thank pepperball. I'm also teaching some pepperball classes coming up pretty soon. I've got one in uh in april williston, north carolina or north dakota my fault Williston, north Dakota. Then I got another one in Taos, new Mexico, coming up, and then Samarkand Training Academy in North Carolina. So if you're interested in one of those classes, go to wwwpepperballcom that's our sponsor and check out the training schedule and I'd love to see you in one of the classes.
Speaker 1:Another big thing that happened this year for me and, I think, for corrections I got invited to. I've been a member of ALITA for quite a while the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association so I've been doing that for quite a while. I think I wrote my first article for the journal back in 2014. So I got invited to come in and be part of the advisory board on corrections. So I'm very thrilled to be part of that and bring a little bit of my knowledge, my experience you know what I learned from you guys and bring that there for them to bring corrections into the fold.
Speaker 1:I guess is the way I'll say it. You know, ilead is a great organization. It's been around for a long time but their focus has kind of been law enforcement. They realize that corrections has kind of been off here to the side and they want to bring them into the fold. And I guess what I'll say first is you know the vendors and the classes that I saw. A large portion of those affect correctional trainers just as much as law enforcement trainers. So I lead as a good organization as it is.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to say I lead as getting improved by bringing corrections in. It's a great organization but we just want to add some specific correctional stuff. But I mean, if a force science institute that works, whether you work in corrections or whether you're working in a law enforcement, you know understanding use of force, the science behind use of force, and if you guys never looked them up, they're great. I got to sit through one of Von Kleim's Graham versus Connor a new perspective, I think was the name of the class and I got to sit through and it was wonderful. I absolutely learned a lot there. But classes like that at that level and the instructors that I got to see while I was there. You know people I've heard about for a long time, so it was great to do that be part of that.
Speaker 1:Part of what they asked us to do was to hold a panel on corrections and invite people in to discuss what I lead to encourage more membership from corrections and more correctional people attending the conference. So myself. David McRoberts, who's a retired correctional captain from Wisconsin and he works as a correctional consultant, now works with companies that build hardened fortified facilities for corrections, so he's got a lot of knowledge. Gary York was on the panel and a lot of you know Gary York. He's been on a couple of our episodes. I've been on his podcast. He's an author and he's also the host of True Prison Stories, so Gary was on there. And then a new friend which I hadn't met before and I hope I don't tear up his name too bad, but it's Ron Scheidt, c-h-e-i-d-t, and he's a longtime probation and parole officer and advocate and correctional advocate.
Speaker 1:So those were the four people they put on the discussion panel and then we had two different times, one on Monday and one on Friday, where corrections was invited or everybody was invited but we ended up with a lot of correctional officers, detention officers, probation and parole officers, you know, instructors from everywhere across corrections were there, even a representative from risk management who insures jails and counties and that was very interesting to talk to him. But so we listened and we took notes and we're planning on how we can improve the corrections portions of Aelita next year. Of course, one of the things we came up with or asked about was what needs to be developed, and people were pretty much in agreement. You know there's a lot of stuff out there duty to intervene, anything that has to do with retention. There's a lot of stuff out there duty to intervene, anything that has to do with retention, recruitment, that type of stuff, risk and liability management, use of force, correctional training officer, which I'll talk about a little bit more about something there here in a minute. But those were all classes and subjects that people wanted to see more of in the correctional. You know, scope of training we also talked a lot about. I feel and you guys may disagree, you may see something different than what I do I feel like law enforcement gets a lot more opportunities at true leadership training, and I'm talking good leadership training, not what somebody at your agency just comes in and puts a PowerPoint together for two hours, which is what I got for a long time. So leadership training from outside sources, from people who have led and understand and are students of it. So they talked about doing some of that with correction-specific leadership classes. So it was a good time.
Speaker 1:I enjoyed ILETA. If you've never been there now, ileta is just not the conference. There's a whole bunch of resources. You can go on Aelitaorg I believe I'll put the link in the show notes to make sure I get it right but you can go to Aelita and there's resources there. You get the journal, the Aelita journal, four times a year and that is a great resource. It's written by some of the top trainers Todd Fletcher, miles Cook. I mean there's just a ton of people that are out there in the training world who write articles for the Aelita Journal. I've written, I think, four or five myself, so it's a great resource. And then once a year they have the Aelita Conference and that's held in St Louis at the Union Station. I think there were 120 vendors and I heard from somebody that there were almost 700 participants.
Speaker 1:I don't know the number of classes. But what I really liked and I didn't get to go to everything I wanted because I was teaching classes also but one of the things that I liked was you can just go to any class you want. You just pick what you feel like you need and the classrooms are open, except if they're certification. I mean, if you're getting a certification, you have to sign up for those ahead of time and you have to meet the requirements of the class. But I know there's at least a hundred classes there that are just open and you can just go learn from some of the best and if it's not what you want that day, you can get up and go to another class. But it was a really great format and I enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:I went to several classes, as many as I could. I got to see the vendors. I spent a day helping work the booth with the guys at Command Presence, so we had a great time. I learned a lot, got to see a lot of what's out there. You know some shooting systems like. Of course I knew Milo, I'd been around Milo, but there were some others out there virtual reality type stuff that I found really cool. There's a what do you call them Radio controlled, like robots with cameras. That were really neat. So there's a bunch of stuff out there that I had not seen at SHOT Show or that I hadn't seen at the Mock Riot. So check it out. Check out, aelita.
Speaker 1:If you're a correctional trainer, you need to be part of it. You really do. It's going to give you access to some of the top trainers firearms trainers, leadership trainers in the country, so I highly recommend it. If you have any questions, shoot me an email and I'll help you with what I can. Next, I'd like to talk a little bit about Command Presence. It's one of the companies I work for that I teach classes for, and earlier this year we sat down and we talked about developing a correctional training officer program. Now Command Presence has a field training officer program for law enforcement and it is great. We're so busy with it. Sometimes it's hard to keep up and keep the instructors. They're just going constantly to teach this.
Speaker 1:I got to sit through one four weeks ago I think it was down in Louisiana and I truly enjoyed that getting to see how they set up that FTO program, the way command presence is approaching it, with a coach, trained and evaluate. You know, we saw, or we saw, when I was young, when I was coming up through corrections, it was ran more like basic training, you know, as opposed to having somebody come up and talk to you about what they expect out of you and then show you what they expect out of you, give you an opportunity to do it right and succeed at it and then evaluate you. I was used to. You know here's what you do. Come back tomorrow, we're going to put you through this and you get evaluated right there and if you didn't do it, then you know you did it again and you did it again and I really like this coach train evaluate method of the FTL program they have. So that's something we've been working on.
Speaker 1:I'm happy to announce that July we're going to have that out and I've got a couple of classes coming out. If you're interested, we're going to have a class in August in Ingham County, michigan. It's a brand new. That's going to be the first correctional training officer program. It's a three-day class, so come up there. I'd love for you to be part of that class. I've also got another one in September at Green Lake, wisconsin, and love to see you at that one, if you get the chance. I mean, if you want to go to one of those, go to commandpresencenet. That's my company's that I work for. That's their website. Go, check out commandpresencenet, and I'd love to see one of those new CTO programs. Let's see what else. If you haven't been on Corrections 1 in the last week or so, jump on there.
Speaker 1:I just got a new article up. It's called the Culture of Compliance Breaking Destructive Patterns in Correctional Fac facilities, and you know we're talking about leadership failures and, when that happens, how that culture can turn toxic. You know we're seeing a lot of that in the news the New York officers who were involved in that use of force up there I forget what they're up to. I think the last I looked there was 18 that have been indicted on that. And that's the way these things work when somebody does something wrong, the tentacles go out. I was involved in one of those one time. I wasn't even at work when the incident happened, but I had worked at a control center a couple of weeks before and so I was part of an investigation because of what someone else had done on an escorted trip to the hospital.
Speaker 1:That's the bad thing when one of our people does something wrong, there's tentacles that go out through there and, as part of the after actions, everybody's looking for blame, everybody's looking to find out who made a mistake or who didn't do their job, and it's not always a good way to learn or change what was wrong. But I've been through that, so you know how do we stop these cultures that don't seem to have a duty to intervene, that aren't watching their people and aren't watching out for each other, because the supervisors aren't always there. Sometimes it's you and me. You have to remind the guy working next to you or the girl working next to you. This is how we do this job. This is the correct way. This is the professional way. This is what makes our agency look good. This is how we build good culture for everybody that works here, and sometimes that's mostly up to the individual.
Speaker 1:So anyway, if you get the chance, go to Corrections 1 and take a look at that article. I think you might like it. I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me an email if you read that article and got something from it. I've already got a couple of people who I've talked to that have some very strong opinions about duty to intervene, and that's a tough thing to do? It absolutely is. So what else? Well, I guess the big thing I want to talk about while we've got a moment, I want you guys to keep your eyes out and I'll be putting out some stuff on social media Facebook, linkedin and about my new book.
Speaker 1:So I've written a couple of books. You guys have seen those. I've talked about a couple of them on the podcast, but I'm really excited about the newest one. It's going to be called Power Skills Emotional Intelligence and Soft Skills for Correctional Officers, first Responders and Beyond, and so why did I name it that way? Well, I got to sit through a class. I guess it's been almost a year ago. I sat through a class Miles Cook gave that class and he was talking about emotional intelligence. And I'm going to tell you the truth, I've sat through a bunch of classes and working for the DOC, working for the BOP, and most of the time they have, you know, annual training. You got to sit through the plethora of mandated classes and one of them they started putting in years ago was emotional intelligence, but it was always taught by a psychiatrist or a psychologist.
Speaker 1:And so here's this psychologist up in front of a class full of, you know, penitentiary correctional officers talking about how I should be more empathetic, how I should get in touch with my feelings, how I should get in touch with the feelings of the inmates, and any of you that know, any of you that have been around for a long time, that doesn't necessarily ring well right. It doesn't sound well good to our ears, um, and we kind of become resistant to that because we're manipulated so much. When you start talking about the word feelings, right, uh, correctional officers tend to push away from that. I don't have feelings at work, you know, and I've I've said this for years, you know, somebody will say there I don't want to hurt your feelings, you can't hurt my feelings. I've got one feeling left and, uh, it's hidden, you know, and I've told people that for years. But so I never took emotional intelligence very serious, okay, okay.
Speaker 1:So I'm sitting through Miles's class and he's talking about emotional intelligence as a way to understand feelings. It's not so much the empathy although you have to have empathy in order to detect and to understand what's going on with others and what's driving them it gives you and this is what he called it, he said superpowers, and that was where I got power skills at. It gives you superpowers to understand the motivation of the people you're dealing with. And that can be staff, that can be your boss, that can be inmates, that can be children. But if you learn to understand what feelings are going on now, you can understand what emotions are driving their behaviors. Okay, and Miles called that a superpower and I was just like, wow, I've never heard it put that way. I've never, I've never thought of it that way. So that was the first step.
Speaker 1:I talked to a warden friend of mine not too long after that and she told me that we were talking about what staff need these days and she said well, one of the things that's missing the most is just basic soft skills. And I said soft skills and she's like yeah, you know, the ability to go have a conversation, communication, just basic communication, which is something I struggled with, believe it or not. Productivity, self-care, wellness, teamwork, some of those skills that you know I grew up with. It wasn't unusual for us to be forced by a parent when you went to church or when you went to school and they'd kind of give you that nudge Well, step up and say hi to Mrs So-and-so. Or have you my dad, you know, have you shaken Mr So-and-so's hand? Yet? Those were skills that we were taught, and a lot of what's happened with the cell phone, the digital age, is that the younger generation has lost some of the ability.
Speaker 1:I know I just had a conversation not too long ago. Someone texted me and I said well, hey, give me a call tomorrow, I'll text you. I don't want to text when there's you know, 14 paragraphs of stuff to say. I said no, just give me a call. Well, I don't like, I don't like phone calls. How do you do business, how do you communicate, if you can't call somebody and have a conversation? Not everything can be done through text. So these were some of the things that I saw. So I came up on, started writing this I think it probably started as an article and then I grew it to power skills, you know, emotional intelligence and soft skills for correctional officers, and so I started telling my stories. You know, this is how I learned.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you one I never was very good at small talk, right? I just didn't have time for it, I was busy, I had things. You one I never was very good at small talk, right, I just didn't have time for it. I was busy. I had things to do, there was work to do, and when I wasn't working, I was trying to figure out how to get things ready for the next day, or I was getting ready to go home and then I had stuff to do at home. So I never had time for small talk and it wasn't a big priority to me. And when I became a lieutenant, one of the things we did was walk around and make rounds, make sure that your officers are doing okay, see if they need anything, talk to them for a few minutes. And I really was struggling with it and, I'll be honest, one of the things I struggled with I'm an unusual. I guess I'm an unusual man.
Speaker 1:Pro sports doesn't really interest me a whole lot. I loved playing sports in high school. I competed in Highland games for years. I love being part of sports. I'll even jump in on a pickup game if somebody wants to. I like the activity, I like sports. I just don't want to keep track of people's free throw average. I don't want to keep track of people's you know free throw average. I don't want to. I don't want to keep track of their RBI. I don't want to know what teams win and what, what their you know game wins and losses this year is, it doesn't interest me, I'm, it's hard for me to sit. Still, I've got a friend that says I can't fish, I can't sit there like that. And I kind of feel the same way about sports. So I don't normally sit down in front of the TV and watch a sports game.
Speaker 1:So that was kind of a weakness, because what did most of the male officers, what did they use for small talk? And it was sports. They wanted to talk about sports, and so I haven't kept up on this and I'm having trouble being part of that conversation. So, becoming a new leader, one of the things I did I had about a 20-minute drive to work and I found an AM sports channel, and so one of the things I started doing on that 20-minute drive was, every morning I tuned into that AM sports channel and listened to what they were talking about, and what that gave me was some small talk, right, some small talk that I could, you know, as I went through the day and I saw, hey, you need anything today, everything going, okay, that's family and so-and-so. One last night I'm like, yeah, I heard that they were playing so-and-so, and so I became better at small talk. So that's kind of some of the stuff you know I learned and that's what I put in here. How I overcame a lot of this stuff, how I learned some of it I didn't have to overcame, some of it became naturally to me, but I had never put names to it before.
Speaker 1:Right, you know emotional intelligence isn't one thing. Emotional intelligence is is several things put together and the first one is self-awareness. Before you can become emotionally intelligent about other people and what they're feeling and what they're thinking and why their behaviors are the way they are, you have to understand why you do all that. You have to stop and take some time to become aware. What makes me tick? Why do I get up in the morning? Are my actions driving me forward? You know what desires do I have, what motivations do I have, and once you understand that about yourself, you learn to understand your own actions. So you know, that's one part of emotional intelligence. Another one is self-management Learning how to control, learning, and one thing I talk about is learning how to respond instead of react. You know I talk about the conversational thermostat understanding the conversation and, as conversations go up in temperature, right, being able to change that, being able to respond and not add more fuel to the fire. And you know as well as I do, if you've worked in a prison, that's what inmates try. They are there on that door. They're trying to get you to try to push your button, trying to get just littlest bit of reaction out of you, because if they can get that reaction out of you, they've overcome your ability to manage yourself right. So self-management is part of emotional intelligence.
Speaker 1:Social awareness is part of emotional intelligence. What's social awareness? It's about looking inward and looking outward to understand and appreciate the feelings of others, the motivations of others and sometimes it's not just motivations, social awareness. You ever drive down the road and there's the old lady going to church in front of you and she's 15 miles an hour under the speed limit and you're just fuming. I don't know if everybody does this. I do. It drives me nuts. I can't stand driving one mile an hour under the speed limit. But you know social awareness is understanding that she, that person's not doing that towards you. That person may have trouble hearing, seeing their motor skills. You know they're older, that type of stuff Pregnant lady gets on a on a bus or a airplane. Get up and give your seat. You know that's being socially aware to what someone else is going through. So that's another thing we talk about with emotional awareness.
Speaker 1:And then the last one is social management, and I actually talk about social relationships how do you like that word?
Speaker 1:When you're working in prison, you like the word relationships. Do you have relationships with inmates? I'm going to challenge you and say that you do. And being aware that there is a relationship there and all people, all humans, like it or not, even if you're the biggest, toughest, oldest, nastiest, crabbiest correctional officer sitting in the back of the seg unit, you have emotions. You have feelings. Understanding that everybody has those and how to manage them, how to manage theirs, how to manage yours, is what makes you a good leader and, like it or not, everybody needs to be a leader. Every correctional officer you've heard me talk about it on here every correctional officer is a leader. If you don't understand that there are feelings out there, if you don't understand your feelings and their feelings, you're not going to be able to influence the people you work with. And I'm not talking about influencing them to get them to buy you know, you're not selling Amway here but influencing them to work together as a team, to collaborate towards the same goal. And sometimes that same goal is nothing more than feeding trays on a seg unit today and getting done by one 30 so that we can work on another project. Right, sometimes that's all it is. But if you don't understand people's motivations and be able to recognize those emotions, you're not going to have any influence with them. So that's some of the stuff we talk about, or I talk about.
Speaker 1:I say we, I talk about in the new book. I also go into leadership absolutely. You know how we influence up and down the ladder, how we influence inmates, how we influence our peers, how we influence the public, how we can change culture. An individual can change culture. I've done it. I've absolutely done it in the prisons I've worked in. How you present yourself and how you work changes culture. I'm not saying that you can fix everything, but you can change culture. People will follow your lead. If you're truly leading and you're influencing people and they know that you care, people will absolutely follow you and you can change the culture. You can make it better on the shift, on the team in the seg unit, whatever it is you're working in booking right.
Speaker 1:Another thing we talk about is communication, and when I talk about communication, it's not just you and I having a conversation. There's so many ways to communicate these ways these days. Sorry, texting Is texting communication. Do we text as part of our jobs? Some of us do, absolutely. What about phone calls? Is that communication? It is. What about emails? Do you guys take the time to send good emails? That's a big part of our communication these days and people take, they throw emails out there like they're texts and I don't think we should do either one that way.
Speaker 1:If you're a professional and you're trying to set the example and you're trying to set culture at your institution, your agency, your jail, your prison, how you communicate matters, if you're using the letter U to say Y-O-U, that says something about you and your professionalism when people are getting those emails. Learn how to write a good email. Learn how to use carbon copy, blind copy, correctly, okay. Learn about what to put in that email, how to review it, what you're looking for, how to walk away from emails. Most emails should not be sent the moment you write them. You should give it five, 10 minutes, maybe a day, maybe two days, especially if you're upset. Have somebody else read it, have somebody else review it, review other people's stuff and learn what good emails look like. It matters how you communicate, it absolutely does.
Speaker 1:We talk about productivity. You know how we do our job, how we prevent crisis, how we diffuse stuff. You know that's what a correctional officer does, but are we looking for time to make our agency and our housing unit and our shift better? You know, productivity is not a bad thing and I almost feel like a lot of people have taken work and made it something to avoid. You know that comes from COVID. When now we work at home, I want to work at home. Well, are you truly putting in eight hours at home? I think we're finding out that a lot of people aren't. If you're working from home, you should still be doing the work. You should still be productive, and if you're at work, productivity matters. You're setting an example, not only for your peers, not only for the people working around you, but the inmates.
Speaker 1:I have had an inmate who came to me and he told me it was. It actually meant a lot. He said I well, what he said was don't you ever bang in? I said no, I rarely do, unless there's something bad If I bang in something's wrong. He said you're always here. You're always here early. He said I've never seen anybody like that. I didn't grow up around people like that. People I grew up around were always trying to figure out how not to go to work.
Speaker 1:Productivity matters. It's part of who we are. It makes us feel good about ourselves. It gives us a place for accomplishment. There's nothing wrong with it. We shouldn't avoid it.
Speaker 1:And then the final, I guess, thing that I'll touch on today is teamwork and collaboration. Are we good at working together in teams? Are we good at leading teams, or when we all get together? Are we good at leading teams or when we all get together? It's almost a statement on the nature of society right now. You put five people in a room and just ask them to communicate and come to a consensus. They can't hardly do it these days, because every tiny piece of their feeling, every tiny piece of what they think, is all that matters to them. And we've lost the ability to work as a team. We've lost the ability to collaborate, and collaborate is not a bad thing. You're not giving up your ideas. You're not giving up your thoughts. What you're doing is taking the best of each person in a group, taking the best of their ideas, taking the best of their way to do something, taking the best of each person and putting it in a product that makes everybody better, that makes the product better, that makes it easier for us to move forward and get the job done in an effective way. So that's another thing I talk about.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I won't tell you the whole book, I'm not going to sit here and read you the whole book, but I really enjoyed putting this together over the last year. It means a lot to me. It really does. And when I got done I realized that's why I kind of changed the title to correctional officers, first responders and beyond. Because what, what corrections and you've heard, I hear this all the time with law enforcement officers If I could, they'll say if I could, I'll have. I would have every police officer work six months in the jail before they went to the street. Why is that? Well, it's because one thing you learn in a, in a jail, one thing you learn in a prison, is how to communicate and how to talk. Right, there's not very much stuff on my duty belt when I'm inside a jail or inside a prison. Right, I can't go to the duty belt. I'm not carrying stuff in the back of my patrol car. Everything I've got, you know, is in my soft skills, in those power skills of emotional intelligence and the soft skills of communication and teamwork influence right.
Speaker 1:So when I got done with the book, that's when I started thinking you know, this isn't just for correctional officers. Correctional officers are good at it and my 30 years has taught me to be pretty good at it. So I don't want to just share this with corrections. I want to share it with anybody. If you're a dispatcher and you're dealing with crisis and you're dealing with emotional people on a phone, I think there's things you can get from this book. If you're a police officer, if you're dealing with crisis, emotional people, you need to influence people who are stressed and in crisis. I think this book is good for you. I think anybody you know. If you work in ambulance, if you're a firefighter, I think if you're in the military and you want to be a good leader, I think you can get things from PowerSkills. I truly do so.
Speaker 1:I hope you guys will check it out Next couple of weeks. I just uh, I just finished up getting it uploaded. The cover's getting done. So my goal is to have it out by the end of May and I will, of course, put it out on social media and for all of you guys to see and please take a look at it and let me know what you think. So well, that covers quite a bit.
Speaker 1:I I have been busy. I'm not lying, it's been a busy month. I'm ready to take a week off or two and kind of take a break before I head back out teaching some more. So before we go, I'd like to say thank you to omni. You know, omni gives you the ability to watch everything everywhere we we have real-time locating systems that we are placing in prisons and jails and they allow you to alert your staff to heart rates that drop. They allow you to tell where an inmate is every second that he's out there.
Speaker 1:One of the things that a couple of jails have been really interested in and have adopted is the fact we can do contact tracing. I could show you every inmate that an inmate's been in contact with in the last 24 hours, in the last week, in the last month. So that's something that's come along and we're getting a lot of response for that. All of this information is clickable. You know the interface and it's really easy to run the reports and it works with your JMS system. So if you'd like more information on Omni, go to O-M-N-I-R-T-L-S. That's OmniRTLScom, and the RTLS stands for Real-Time Locating System and if you have any questions, absolutely reach out to Mike at theprisonofficercom. If you have questions about anything I've talked about today, whether it's corrections in Aelita, whether it's Omni, pepperball or my new book, feel free to throw an email out there, mike at theprisonofficercom.
Speaker 1:I try to get to those as quick as I can. It might be 24 hours, at the most it's 48. And I will get back with you and let you know. It depends on what I'm doing that day. So for everyone out there, take some time. Go find somebody inside that looks like they need just to talk. Go, spend some time and ask them how they're doing and then stay there for a minute and listen. That's the best thing we can do. Of all my years of corrections, that was what I found helps people the most is to ask them how are you doing and then listen. We get so used to just waving or shaking hands and going down the hall. Spend a moment, find out that they're okay, are shaking hands and going down the hall, spend a moment, find out that they're okay.
Speaker 1:Corrections is a tough business and for some people and at some times it's tougher than others. You know you may have the toughest, meanest, roughest correctional officer, but sometime during his career you've got some downtime. You know where things aren't going your way and you need somebody to pick you up a little bit. So reach out there to that officer and see if you can, you know, brighten their day a little bit. Give everybody a smile. Anyway, I appreciate you guys watching the prison officercom. As always, next week I've got Tim Fosnott, or not. Next week, in two weeks after this, there'll be Tim Fosnott on here. He's the owner of Arc Tactical and then we've already recorded an episode two weeks after that with Brian Antonelli, former BOP officer, with me, and so we're going to talk about a lot of stuff, but that'll be in two episodes from now. But anyway, have a great day and I will see you later.
