When she took a secretarial job at the Kansas State Industrial Reformatory Misti Kroeker was just looking for a job, not thinking about a career.
“I had just graduated from the Dodge City JUCO and had no plans at all of what to do with myself,” she recalled. “I had no thoughts on what kind of career I wanted. I was truly goalless. My parents had just moved to Hutch, so I moved here and took their spare room.”
And as she moved up through various positions over the years, at what is now the Hutchinson Correctional Facility, it was never with a plan of taking the next step beyond that.
Named a deputy warden at the end of last month, Kroeker, 55, confessed she isn’t looking beyond that — to perhaps become warden. But she didn’t rule it out.
“Every single time I’ve taken a promotion, I had not thought that I would want that next level up,” she said. “But every time I’ve taken that next level up… It’s not in my sights now, but I have a lot of years left to work.”
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That first job at the prison: a manual typewriter, hundreds of pages of rules
Kroeker went to work at KSIR on Jan. 26, 1986.
She first applied for a clerical position with the prison’s contracted education provider.
“They interviewed me, and I found out later they liked me and wanted to hire me, but they were very concerned about a 20-year-old girl walking through the middle of the facility every day to where that office was located,” Kroeker said. “So I was passed over.”
Today more than a quarter of the prison’s employees are women.
Les Harmon, an assistant to Warden Bob Hannigan at the time, was also needing clerical support and didn’t want to go through the entire state application process, so he reviewed the applications on file and called Kroeker.
Harmon was one of three deputy wardens and, like with Kroeker’s position today, he oversaw a wide assortment of programs.
“One of the biggies was all of our policies,” Kroeker said. “Our office also did all the audits.”
Using a manual typewriter, she typed hundreds of pages of rules and regulations.
“Mr. Harmon was probably the most perfect first boss you could have,” she said. “He not only taught me jobs to do, but he also began to teach me the culture of the facility. It has a fabulous history. All correctional facilities throughout the state are unique and different from one another. He was showing me that much bigger picture.”
After a couple of years, an opportunity for promotion came along, and she applied to transfer to the East unit, working for Kansas Correctional Industries. At the time, the unit primarily made inmate clothing and was much smaller than today.
Kroeker admits it was one job she had at the prison she didn’t like because it was isolated and she mostly worked alone. She never thought about quitting, though, because of the way she was raised.
“I took a voluntary demotion to become clerical support for the East unit counselors,” she said.
Exposed to counseling, helping prisoners
“That was the absolute best thing I’ve ever done because it opened my eyes to what the counseling staff did.”
Each living unit was staffed with security and counseling staff and had its own clerical staff, she said.
“I really liked that job. I liked the counselors I worked for, and there were actually two secretaries and we worked well together.”
However, she soon decided that counseling was something she wanted to do.
“I didn’t sit in when they were talking to offenders, but I was typing up all the work documents, and I’d heard things as I was moving about. I started to get a glimpse of what a counselor can do,” Kroeker said. “I might have been a little big for my britches when I thought ‘I can do that job.’”
When the next opening came, she applied.
“I didn’t get the job,” she recalled. “But I did well enough it gave me the confidence to try again.”
The third time she applied was the charm.
Counselors work directly with the imprisoned offenders, helping them “navigate their incarceration,” Kroeker said.
“You want the offender to leave with better job skills, better personal skills in interacting with people, and better cognitive skills. You help them to think through decisions they are making; to do it in a better way.”
“The majority of my career was in the counseling ranks,” she said. “I worked in all three units, Central, East, and South.”
Kroeker said she had to prove herself to others in the unit.
“Not so much because I was female but because I came from the clerical staff. Prior to me, every single counselor came from security.”
That meant qualifying on the firing range.
She loved the job, which, she said, was all about building relationships and rapport.
There were times when there were disruptions in the facility, “when it was all hands on deck,” Kroeker said.
“You rely on those working relationships you’ve built with offenders,” she said. “You pick someone out of the crowd and you talk with him and work with him… You can’t quash it all, but you can talk to this guy and get him out of the fray and help him to calm things down.”
A different focus in counseling
From there, she eventually was promoted to Counselor II, another job that she enjoyed, but for different reasons.
“It allowed me to train new counselors, and I’ve trained a lot of counselors over the years,” she said.
One of her current Counselor II’s she first trained as a secretary. Like herself, the woman saw what counselors were doing and wanted to be part of it.
Becoming more than a counselor
From counselor, Kroeker moved to unit team manager, a position she expected to retire from.
“But about 2 ½ years ago another position came open, the East and South Unit Facility Administrator, and I thought ‘I’m ready for the next step.”
She saw the job as less about supervising staff, but more “removing hurdles to allow them to do their jobs”, Kroeker said.
“We have a little city here,” she said. “We have maintenance and foodservice and medical. Most anything you find in a community, you can find a facsimile of in a correctional facility. I don’t know how to do all those things. I don’t know maintenance; I don’t’ teach school. I’m certainly not a nurse. But when something keeps them from doing their job, whatever that might be, I looked at it as my job to get that out of the way so they can do the job they were hired to do.”
“When Mr. Harmon hired me, he told me I’d never be more than a secretary.”
That was because she had only an associate degree from DCCC, not a four-year degree, she explained. And that was fine until she did run into a promotion she could not obtain without the degree.
“It was a job I thought would be the epitome of my career; that golden ring I’d not be allowed to put in an application for. So I cried for a day, and then I went back to school.”
She enrolled at Friends University at the same time her youngest child was in college. She drove to Wichita one night a week for 18-months to complete a degree in organizational management and leadership, graduating in 2012.
“I haven’t always seen myself at the next step up, but I’ve been extraordinarily blessed my entire career to have great mentors,” she said. “Sometimes they can see things you can’t see in yourself. If not for those mentors through my career, I’d not be a deputy warden today.”
Bigger challenges, building teams to help prisoners and employees
As Deputy Warden over programs, she’ll only directly supervise two people, Kroeker said, “but they’re responsible for all the acreage.”
That includes the counseling division, records and classification office, and supervising pastoral care, a three-person office that manages more than 400 volunteers. She’ll also oversee the contracted medical and education providers.
“I’m really, really excited in this position,” Kroeker said. “We’re in one of those odd periods. We have a lot of staff fluctuation in a lot of key positions.”
Those include the long-time classification administrator, a contract program provider, and some clerical staff.
“I’m looking forward to taking all those people in new positions and building a new team as we go forward on our mission… to help (offenders) prepare for release. Newness is scary, but it’s so full of opportunity.”
Unlike with her career, Kroeker and other prison administrators now intentionally encourage new employees to look at the prison as a career and consider what they need to do to improve and move up.
Warden Dan Schnurr said administrative staff routinely use their own stories to let the employees know that there are many paths up and many like Kroeker’s, he said, are unique.
“When I started there was a waiting list for people who wanted jobs,” Schnurr said. “Now it’s not like that. That’s why they talk to new employees about thinking of it as a career path to follow instead of sitting and waiting. You can plan and make strategic moves to be promoted and make it a career.”
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Well-respected through her career
Schnurr noted Kroeker doesn’t like to talk about her achievements, but they are recognized by those who work with her, and he believes she’ll do well in the post.
“She has a really good perspective on how things need to be done, what needs to be done, who needs to be notified,” Schnurr said. “Her organizational skills are just outstanding. All of us look to her for that and being able to multitask.”
When she started at HCF Kroeker was single, but over her career, she married and raised two children who are now adults.
“My career has allowed me the financial freedom to do things with my family I might not have otherwise been able to do,” Kroeker said. “My children have seen me, as they grew up, working in a non-traditional type of work, and that has had a positive impact on them. Their view of the world is not confined to women do this and men do that.”
Prison staff are reluctant to talk about their families for security reasons. But Kroeker said she’s been married 33 years — and her husband has never set foot inside the prison.
When she retires, she said, she’ll ensure he takes a full tour.
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