What Happens When Our Prisons Go ‘Woke’?

D iversity training is hot right now. And you may have heard that employers are doubling down on the concept, forcing their employees to take additional and more aggressive forms of “equity and inclusion” training.

Increasingly, government HR departments are pushing the same agenda as the private sector. Colorado’s state prison system embraced some of the worst forms of these programs. It began requiring all corrections officers to undergo shockingly racist “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) training, so they could apply what they had learned in their work with inmates. The lessons even caused some corrections officers, like our client, former sergeant Joshua Young, to leave their jobs.

Among the “lessons” taught to the officers are, for example, that all whites are racist, that all whites play a part in promoting “white supremacy,” that nonwhite individuals’ life experiences are defined by their “relationship to white supremacy,” that any “discomfort and defensiveness” toward this training that is exhibited by white individuals (and only white individuals) can be dismissed as “white fragility,” and that “the concept of a middle class black only exists in the mind of a middle class black. Everywhere else . . . you were that [N-word] family.” (Yes, the training uses the full N-word.)

In other materials, instructors are urged to push past “white norms” and be ready to encounter “white talk,” which refers to any white person’s denial of personal responsibility for oppressing non-whites.

Yes, these are official government training materials.

The people responsible for guarding prisons are being force-fed racist propaganda on the taxpayer’s dime. This is why Mr. Young — who until recently was a rising star in the Colorado Department of Corrections, working at the Limon Correctional Facility — felt that he could no longer remain silent, and resigned from his position last year. It’s also why we at Mountain States Legal Foundation have filed a civil-rights complaint in federal court on his behalf.

Far from being a harmless academic theory asking people to take a hard, critical look at America’s fraught history of racial injustice, this critical race theory–inspired training is actively teaching prison guards that the key to performing their jobs ethically is to start seeing the inmates and their fellow guards not as individuals, but instead as faceless members of monolithic racial groups. Of course, that theory will have entirely predictable and disastrous results.

First, the diversity-training regime is creating a culture of distrust among prison guards and further corroding the expectations that guards have managed to build with inmates, creating unnecessary risks to guard safety. Prison guards work in an incredibly high-stress environment where the risk of violence is rarely more than a moment away. Working in that kind of environment requires a high degree of trust, both in one’s fellow guards and in one’s training.

But racist training destroys the culture that makes such trust possible. Terrified of being tarred and feathered with that most effective of modern slurs, “racist,” guards will hesitate to use force in situations where their or their fellow guards’ (or inmates’) lives may be on the line. Will prison guards question whether breaking up a fight between inmates furthers white supremacy? Or whether another prison guard is enforcing official prison policy only because of his white privilege?

Similarly, individuals who feel the need to constantly walk on eggshells will be less likely to stand up to defend each other when necessary and will second-guess themselves when doing so. This is to say nothing of the effect that emphasizing racial differences over shared experiences can have on group cohesion in general. Once a culture of trust is gone, it will never come back.

The impact of CRT-inspired diversity training will not stop with the guards themselves, however. The racist propaganda will invariably trickle down to the inmates, where the long-term results are also likely to be harmful. The last thing that an incarcerated person needs is for those in positions of authority to see them merely as members of an oppressed or oppressor racial group, rather than as individuals.

Using the force of government to indoctrinate people into viewing their fellow citizens not as individuals, but as members of monolithic groups defined by skin color, is both deeply wrong and deeply harmful for all involved. It would be shocking if any employer engaged in this sort of training. It’s even more shocking that these are the official training materials of a state prison system.

David C. McDonald is an attorney and William E. Trachman is the general counsel at Mountain States Legal Foundation.