Meet Director Ashbel Wall
Nine years on the job, Ashbel T. Wall, the Yale-educated intellectual who found his passion in the despondent world of captivity, is now the nation’s second-longest serving director of corrections. The Providence Journal has a long article on the Director of the Rhode Island Department of Corrections.
[Wall] might be the only one who lists his home address in the phone book. Certainly you won’t find Arkansas’ Larry Norris, the country’s longest-reigning corrections director, with 15 years of service, advertising where an ex-con with a grudge might find him. “Absolutely not,” says Norris. “A.T.’s one brave soul. He marches to a different drummer, I guess” …
“Rhode Island’s a small place and if people want to find you they can,” Wall, who is 55, explains as he prepares to head off to work. “I am a public official and I’m not afraid. And I think that if I have an unlisted phone number and try to hide my address it sends a message that I’ve got something to fear. And as far as I’m concerned, I don’t. I do make a lot of decisions that make people upset. And I have gotten some uncomfortable phone calls over the years and some unusual people have shown up around the house.” Like the boisterous crowd that once descended to advocate for more rights for prisoners. But, says Wall, “The police know where I live” …
Besides the overarching mission of protecting the public from criminals, Wall says his job includes demystifying a department that is now also striving to reduce crime by smoothing inmates’ transitions back into society through education and treatment programs … “I really have had a very good run,” he says of his years leading a department with 1,400 employees and a $201-million budget. “No successful escapes from secure facilities, no homicides, neither staff nor inmates. No intervention by the federal courts. And I really do have to give credit to the staff. There is always a certain measure of conflict — confrontation in the air within the department — but on the ground, people do a terrific job” …
Wall, who doesn’t smoke or drink alcohol or caffeinated beverages, deals with the stresses of the job … by satisfying a craving for Hershey’s mini chocolate bars. On a bad day, his staff says, he can devour dozens … Wall was a junior at Yale when he interned as a Connecticut probation officer. He found corrections work so exciting, so “vivid,” that he put his law degree on hold to accept a full-time position. Later he worked as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan and served as director of the Manhattan Community Service Sentencing Project before returning to Rhode Island to work for then-Governor DiPrete.
There is a great deal more to learn abour Director Wall in the article.