State of California Memorandum

Date: January 6, 2020

To: CDCR Employees Statewide
CCHCS Employees
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

Subject: NEW VISION AND MISSION STATEMENT FOR THE CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
AND REHABILITATION AND CALIFORNIA CORRECTIONAL HEALTH CARE SERVICES

As we start a new year at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) and California Correctional Health Care Services (CCHCS), we will take a moment to thank all of you who work so hard and so effectively in our department, whether you are in custody, health care, parole, programming, administration or elsewhere. In particular, we thank those of you who worked on the recent holidays. Your service is greatly appreciated.
This is more than the start of a new year; it’s the start of a new decade, and we begin it by recommitting ourselves to the fundamentals of our profession. Effective immediately, CDCR and CCHCS have new vision and mission statements, and here they are:
Vision
We enhance public safety and promote successful community reintegration through education, treatment and active participation in rehabilitative and restorative justice programs.
Mission
To facilitate the successful reintegration of the individuals in our care back to their communities equipped with the tools to be drug-free, healthy, and employable members of society by providing education, treatment, rehabilitative, and restorative justice programs, all in a safe and humane environment.

These sentences are of great importance because they describe what we do and what we aspire to do.

As you can see, they start and end with the concept of “safety.” Everything we do is oriented around keeping people safe – staff, the population, volunteers, visitors, crime victims and the community at large. Having grounded ourselves in public safety, the question is how do we ensure and enhance that? The answer to that question is also in the vision and mission statements: education, treatment, rehabilitation, health care and restorative justice. These
aren’t optional extras in a safe and humane correctional system -they are the keys to success.

The new vision and mission statements result from legislation in 2016 that added restorative justice to the purpose of imprisonment, along with punishment and rehabilitation, and directed CDCR to update its mission statement accordingly. We and those who report to us will be ensuring that the vision and mission statements are promoted throughout and outside of our department, and that they show the way for all of us to do our respective jobs, today and in the future.

Again, we thank you for choosing to work here and we look forward to continued progress at CDCR and CCHCS.