A woman who started her career as corrections officer and worked her way up through the ranks is the new warden at the state’s maximum-security prison.
Janie Mendez has been in the top job at the Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison for around one month. Mendez says moving through the correctional system helped prepare her for this job. “I think going to the different facilities and getting exposed to the different custody levels, the different population, and working in those different capacities really kind of kept my professional growth moving,” she says.
She started as a corrections officer at the Oakdale Classification Center in 2003, spent 15 years at the Mount Pleasant prison, then moved to Fort Madison as a counselor and continued advancing there. Mendez says her time as a counselor gave her a good view of the prisoners she worked with. “Being a counselor for 15 years, you know, I really got to dive into some of the elements of working closely with the population on their, you know, their history, their life circumstances, which led them to coming to prison. And so, it’s, You know, everybody has their upbringings. Everybody has their path in life,” she says.
Mendez says she’s definitely a big supporter of working with the inmates who are going to eventually get out and trying to point them in a better direction. “They’re going to be in somebody’s neighborhood at some point. And so being able to contribute to any kind of personal growth for them to not re-offend or create victims or you know, just do anything else that hurts someone else or even themselves,” Mendez says.
She says they try to help by providing them with some tools to better equip themselves when they complete their sentence. “Because. a lot of times their life circumstances, they weren’t exposed to those positive influences to keep them in a good way,” Mendez says. “And so if we can give them some of those things to put them on a better path, then that’s a success.”
As the new warden of the Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison there are prisoners that won’t ever leave. When asked if this is the biggest challenge of her career, Mendez says she looks at it differently. “I kind of like to twist challenges and look at them more like opportunities. The word challenge, I don’t really get bogged down with, because challenge can have a negative connotation sometimes, and I kind of like to spin it for a positive and where are there opportunities,” she says.
Mendez says overseeing the maximum-security prison presents plenty of opportunities, as the population is changing and mindsets are evolving. “There’s just different dynamics that are contributing to things changing. Whether it’s, the types of contraband that can come inside the facility, the staffing levels that are supervising the population, you know, all those elements, all those variables are part of the changing times,” she says.
Mendez says it’s up to her as the leader of the facility to adjust to those changes to improve overall operations to best handle and facilitate those constant changes. The prison drew a lot of attention after a corrections officer and a nurse were killed there in 2021 in an escape attempt by two prisoners. Mendez says there’s a lot of assumptions about prisons, and she hears some of it when she tells people what she does.
“Either negative connotations or just intimidated type of thoughts about what prison is like. And, you know, ’cause all they’re exposed to is what’s in, what they’re seeing on TV or, heard stories about,” Mendez says. Mendez says she isn’t dismissing some of those factors, like the violence, because they do exist inside the prison. She says people don’t realize how the team of people running the prison work together in many ways to make it work.
Mendez says she’s learned to adjust to the inmates, especially in this situation where many of them are never going to be released. “I have been able to work in all the minimum, medium, maximum custody, so there are differences when walking amongst the population in the different facilities. And it’s just a matter of adapting your personality, adapting your approach,” she says. Mendez says that’s why there is a lot of training involved for those who work behind the walls of the penitentiary.
“It takes a while to get your routine of how to facilitate, how to even work amongst the population, the different rapport building that you have to build there, not to mention daily schedules of operations. And, you know, so there is a lot,” Mendez says. She says she encourages newly hired staff to ask lots of questions and she tries to help them get adjusted to their daily work duties.