Her Story
About Kalyn
My journey to criminal justice wasn't a straight path. I started in healthcare, getting my CNA certification while in high school and working in a nursing home. After graduation, I wanted to pursue nursing school, but I got overwhelmed by college and ended up dropping out. I met my husband right after high school, and while he finished his criminal justice degree, I worked in childcare and eventually became an assistant director. I then stayed home with our kids for a while. After we moved from my hometown of Huntsville to my husband's hometown and I had our youngest, I went back to work and started in criminal justice almost 3 years ago. For about a year now, I've been working in inmate grievance at a maximum security male facility. My typical day starts at 3 or 3:30 in the morning. I get to work by 6, make my coffee, and then my coworker and I go pick up grievances from different buildings. We read through them, determine what the complaints are about, and code them by category, whether it's a staff complaint, issues with inmate tablets, medical complaints, or other concerns. If there's an emergency grievance like an outcry of sexual abuse or harassment, we notify the proper authorities immediately. We file grievances by due date and work through our investigations accordingly. Going through the Correctional Officer Academy was a significant achievement for me because it gave me insight into what officers experience and helped me take more pride in the impact of my work.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Kalyn
01What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Honestly, sometimes the deadline of things is challenging, like trying to get all the information and then wondering if I have everything and if I can answer to the best of my knowledge. It's also about accurately relaying information to higher-ranking officers to say, hey, these are a lot of the problems that we've been getting, can we come up with a solution to get these things maybe fixed, or come up with a better way to do certain things? The work can get a little overwhelming because I do work in a bigger unit, so we have a lot of grievances that come in. It's definitely challenging knowing there's certain things that, no matter what you do, you're not gonna be able to fix or change. On the opportunity side, it's nice to see how women have come a long way in criminal justice. I don't think until maybe the 90s, mid-90s, is when women started even just being correctional officers. It was very rare that you saw women who were correctional officers, and then now seeing women who have been head wardens, they're directors, it's just nice to see how women have come a long way.
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