Key Points
- CoreCivic’s Multifaceted Operations and Community Focus: Matt Lowney shared an overview of CoreCivic’s diverse business lines, including safety (correctional facilities) and community (transitional housing and skill-building for reintegration). The organization is deeply invested in preparing individuals to re-enter society successfully, providing programs like GED completion, vocational certifications, and substance use rehabilitation.
- Veteran Integration and Support: CoreCivic is committed to supporting veterans, reservists, and military families. With over 11% of employees identifying as veterans and active participation in veteran Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), the company integrates military culture into its operations. Initiatives include crediting military service in hiring and promotions and partnering with programs like SkillBridge.
- Opportunities for Growth and Innovation: Matt highlighted CoreCivic’s focus on data analytics to improve operations, including predictive tools for safety and recidivism tracking. He also emphasized leadership pathways within the company, especially for those transitioning from military careers, and discussed plans to bridge gaps for military veterans to take on leadership roles in corrections.
Transcript
Emily Bose: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Landing Zone Nashville. I’m Emily Bose with Transition Overwatch, and we are a platform connecting the military community with great places to live and work in the Nashville area. So excited to have Matt Lowney on the show with me today. He is the Managing Director of Talent Acquisition and HR Operations for CoreCivic. And it sounds like he’s been in the Nashville area for quite some time. So I’m excited to hear more from Matt about the work he’s doing and also some tidbits about the area. So, Matt, thanks so much for being on the show.
Matt Lowney: Well, I appreciate you having us and reaching out and perhaps share a little bit about our story here at CoreCivic and specifically what we do with militaries.
Emily: Absolutely. I’m excited to dig in. So before we came live, just in our chat beforehand, we were talking about how CoreCivic seems to be a really interesting business. You guys have obviously corrections, but you also have different types of facilities. You have, it sounds like a pretty substantial real estate business and quite a few services that you guys provide that I think might be surprising for people. So would you mind giving us just a little bit of an overview of what you guys do for people that might not be familiar? And then also, there are quite a few career paths, career options that go into those various business lines. So if you could illuminate some of that for us as well, I think that’d be great.
Matt: Yeah, happy to do so. And again, thanks for the opportunity. I think if you look at CoreCivic, we’re about 11,500 employees, and we split over two primary kind of business units as a way to think of it. One is what we call safety—that’s what you and I would know as prisons, you know, safety facilities around the country. And then the other is what we call community, which would be very much kind of your transitional halfway house. It’s another way people call them.
This is the transition out to full-time living in the community. And so that’s kind of skills preparedness. And so between those two, we’ve had this continuum of services. We work with government partners—that’s kind of who, whether they’re state partners or federal partners.
And so I think what people think about, right, as we all probably see in movies, right, the prison is not the greatest place in the world. I think what we lose sight of is, you know, 90% of people with whom we work actually enter the communities back. And our goal is to make sure they are clearly better prepared for their life journey at that point.
Part of that, right, is we provide health services, mental health needs—obviously, a big part of their existence and all of ours, really. And then people don’t think about programs. So part of that would be substance use disorder. If they came to us and have some issues with addiction, we have thousands of people go through that annually.
And then it’s just education, whether it’s GED. We have folks who get certifications for programming. Some of our facilities can be auto diesel mechanics. So we look at the communities and go, well, what are the skills that will employ folks with kind of a second chance employment? And where are their jobs? So we have to match that up. And then we have to provide those services in terms of programs.
So a lot of it is around how do we prepare them to be better equipped to be citizens and go back to the communities they serve. And that’s one thing I think we don’t do. And it’s one of my goals for next year, from a recruiting standpoint—which is pretty much half of my life here—is how do we leverage those programmatic stories as recruiting stories?
Because I think, right, if you don’t think about how we post a job for a correctional officer, they have a certain view of that. They don’t connect to how their work kind of prevails to the better good, the greater good of preparing folks and communities being safer.
Emily: That’s an amazing point. Yeah. No, it’s perfect. I think exactly to your point that there’s a lot of amazing stories there. And I think something that the military community, by and large, tends to really be drawn to is meaningful or purpose-driven work. And when you know that you’re helping enrich the lives of people to come back and maybe change their lives in the community…
I saw you guys had an entrepreneur that had previously been incarcerated who was featured pretty heavily on your website. I watched his video about the talk he came and gave, and that seemed so inspiring and awesome. And I love that he was, you know, giving back specifically into the community that he had come from and really trying to reinvest there, and how much hope and vision that seemed to give some of the other inmates.
And so, uh, it seems like there’s a lot of good that can happen in that. I thought I saw in a video somewhere that was like 600,000 people who come out of the prison system every year. Do you know?
Matt Lowney: I can’t speak to the overall… I’m not actually sure of the exact. That’s a good question. I’m not sure. That feels about right, but I’d just be guessing.
Emily: That’s a huge number. You don’t always think about people leaving and coming back. And I’ve watched people in my own personal life try to reenter society after being in pretty intense correctional experiences. And it can be very difficult. So having those skills and resources and job training and all of that is powerful. I’m glad that you guys are doing that. I think it’s really important.
Matt: I think if you look at it, I think the number—and I should be able to quote this better—but something like 30% of folks have some kind of, let’s say, justice-involved background. It doesn’t mean necessarily that they’ve been incarcerated. It could very well be. And the percentage of folks who have a felony… Right.
It really is this kind of meaningful disconnect in society. How do we prepare them in all the ways they need to be prepared, right? I hope that’s what we’re doing. And I think we have lots of evidence cases for programs and outcomes and stories like the gentleman who came on-site.
I think what’s also interesting is you don’t think about our affinity groups, for lack of a better term, within a correctional environment. So, we have facilities that, frankly, have folks who are military. They’re either retired military or military and are incarcerated.
We actually have groups of folks at our facilities that have specific pods and groupings of just former military because they have that bond together.
Emily: Oh, cool.
Matt: And they have, you know, specific needs as well. So I think it makes a lot of sense even for the military connection within the facilities. You don’t think about it, but it’s certainly real, and we’ve helped connect to that.
And from an attraction standpoint on messaging, I’m really proud of the fact that so many of the folks on my recruiting team are actually retired military. Patty, our Senior Director, retired Air Force, went to the Air Force Academy. I could rattle off easily a third of the people who do recruiting here for our team are themselves retired from the military.
And so they have a personal connection. It’s been good for them, and they want to make sure that it’s good for others. They can also tell the story and talk in ways that I certainly don’t have a first-party experience with.
Emily: For sure. It’s powerful and impactful for them, but also they’re passionate about it. So that’s what, you know, kind of when you reached out, that’s what kind of makes this far easier for us.
Matt: Somewhere around 11% of our employees self-identify as military veterans.
Emily: OK.
Matt: Internally, we actually, a week or two ago, had—once a year, we have a veterans program, clearly around Veterans Day, that anybody from the company can attend virtually or in person. It’s probably 80 people down in a conference room jammed together, and they do a very neat program.
They had somebody, Mark Collie, who was a—you can look him up, he’s a country music star. I guess the ’90s. He came and sang, and he had a military group called Soldier’s Child, which is a nonprofit that was founded here in Middle Tennessee.
It gives presents—started out by giving presents to children who’ve lost parents in the military. And I think it’s a pretty cool thing. It’s grown, and they’ve got thousands of people, and they do camps and all this. So, and we’re a big supporter of them.
So it’s tangible, I guess, is all of that to say. It’s kind of tangible. Certainly, a little place on the career site says veterans and it tells stories of people, but just seeing the tangibility of the day in and day out and the way we interact is a really cool thing, you know?
Emily: Absolutely. I wanted to quickly give a shout-out just because we mentioned it. Marcus Bullock was the name of that tech founder who was giving back into that community. So just wanted to mention his name in case anyone wants to look up what he’s doing. It’s very cool.
Emily Bose: Absolutely. I wanted to quickly give a shout-out just because we mentioned it. Marcus Bullock was the name of that tech founder who was giving back into that community. So just wanted to mention his name in case anyone wants to look up what he’s doing. It’s very cool.
But I love what you were saying about having that military community kind of built in, and interesting to know—I mean, having 10-plus percent of the workforce there and you may have other military spouses or folks who wouldn’t identify as veterans that are probably connected to the community as well.
We’re trying to draw—I mean, veterans are obviously a huge priority, but we’re trying to draw, you know, kind of a bigger delineation to say, hey, you know, military spouses, National Guardsmen, folks, reservists, veterans, active-duty military members who are getting ready to transition—these are all the different people we’re trying to focus on with what we’re doing here at the podcast.
So you may even have a—if you look at that broader community, you might even have more people. But that’s a really meaningful percentage of your force, which is really great. And I know for people who are transitioning out of the military, a lot of times it can be challenging or intimidating to go into a really different environment.
You don’t always realize how supportive the military is. You have that strong team environment. It’s heavily structured, all of that. And when you go out into a corporate office where maybe no one else is a veteran, or maybe there’s one or two in your entire company, that can have its challenges.
So knowing, you know, at CoreCivic, they can come in and at least one in every ten people they interact with is probably a veteran. That’s pretty powerful knowledge for them to feel supported.
Matt Lowney: I’ll give you an example. This just happened at the time you reached out to me about doing this. We have a gentleman on my team, and he’s been out of college for a while. He comes in and said, well, I think he is going to go to boot camp.
He’s talking about, like, what kind of leave, you know, like what leave, you know, leaving on. So of course, we’ll support—he’s been here for years. And so I didn’t know that he’s even interested in joining the military. He just kind of came and said to someone, you know, can I take off half a day to go take the test?
And I said, sure, of course you can. You don’t need to take PTO to do something like that. But it brought up a unique challenge I never thought about—the difference between pay from the job he’s taking now versus when he goes to boot camp. It’s different money. And I’m like, oh, that’s not something anybody’s ever thought of.
I chased it around. We don’t have a policy. But what I think—and I don’t have an answer, by the way—but what was interesting is how open we were about going, hey, we probably should think about that scenario. We’re chasing that. Does this happen for other people?
Most folks come to us post-military, but say, hey, I’ve worked here four or five years; this is important to me. I want to go. You know, he’s going to be gone for, you know, months, right? Because he’s also going to do some specialist training after that.
And, you know, beyond just the—obviously, there’s a job here for him—that’s beyond that. How do we support him on this kind of mid-career stream journey? Because he’s a smart guy. We want him to be involved with CoreCivic long term.
So I think what’s cool is we took that seriously, beyond just the support. But perhaps we need to think more fully—are there other people we should help with some kind of bridge? I have no idea. But we’re very open to the narrative around how we can help in those unique situations.
I think a lot of employers would say, well, that’s a decision you made, and there’s a job here for you because of leave acts. But at the end of the day, I think it’s more than that. So that’s important.
Emily: Yeah, absolutely.
Matt: Goodness, I wish I had the number of military-focused or adjacent charities we sponsor. I know we do a lot with Operation Stand Down. I went to their luncheon here in Nashville two or three weeks ago. It was 1,100 people in a room.
Of course, it was one of those title events. We’re one of the featured sponsors, as we typically are for these kinds of things. And there’s another—anything that would be kind of military- or safety-related we get very, very involved with, particularly with the local base.
So no one will tell me how much we spend, by the way, but I know it’s hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on these kinds of charity things.
Emily: That’s awesome.
Matt: It’s real. It’s tangible, right? I think the connectivity of Fort Campbell is obvious geographically, but we have facilities in, gosh, 14 states.
And we actually started to list out, all right, which facilities make sense? Which military bases should we build connections with? We just don’t have the time or people to go to everywhere, right? So at some point, what makes sense? And we’re still refining that.
But we do 20 to 30 on-site military recruiting events annually just because we always have to, to be honest. So it’s a good thing.
Emily: That’s awesome. And I know before the show, we were talking a little bit about some of the programs that you guys have internally, like a veteran ERG program or those types of things. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you guys are doing with that?
Matt: So, yeah, we have three kind of employee resource groups, and the most active is the military ERG, for all the reasons. Plus, Jason Medlin, one of our head field operations people, retired military, is very, very passionate. So he’s the sponsor for that. He’s done, you know, kind of big pushes in many ways. For example, when you start in a correctional facility—here in Middle Tennessee, we’re fortunate we have a corporate office, but we have a couple of correctional facilities within commutable range—but he’s like, how do we give credit for military service when you come in to be a correctional officer, right?
And so that essentially is your first job. Well, depending on what grade you came out, we actually do give you credit for time served. So you actually enter at a higher rank within CoreCivic, which is also more money. And the idea is giving credit for time in service.
We actually do get, and I’ve got a whole grid, and I wish I could tell you like E-4 or E-5—and I know the different branches—but we do absolutely give credit for that. And I think that’s cool.
That’s something Jason, who’s a head of ops and a retired veteran himself, he pushed for hard. It’s not just as simple as paying. We actually have to go to partners who agree to this because they’re the ones who are reimbursing us for people. So they have to go, yeah, that makes sense.
And by the way, we might do that for our facilities. And so between all these affinity groups, it’s not—it is to build a community of networking and professional connectivity within the org, but a lot of it is an outshoot of how do we help attract people to the org, how to retain them who have this background.
So there’s a lot of ideas that come out of that. And sometimes it’s like, what can we support? Like, we’re going to redo the career site again and tell more military-specific stories. And that’s great. It’s not a hard thing to redo.
Emily Bose: I’m glad that that’s at the core, and it connects all the way down to the frontline recruiter who’s telling the story to the candidate because they sat in their shoes, which I think is super important as well.
Matt: Absolutely. And we have some ideas on the forefront. I would love to figure out how I get somebody that has been a leader in the military to be a leader in a correctional setting and an educational bridge.
You can’t just walk in and be like, hey, I’m going to be a chief of unit management. But how far is that bridge, and how can we make it work? We’re talking about that actively with learning and development to kind of say, hey, why don’t we hire some folks, and they could come from this job in the military.
And we think in six months we can get them confident to do this job in a correctional setting and get them at a higher—more credit for time served, but also more value to us as leveraging leadership skills. So these are the ERGs coming out with these things.
Emily: That’s awesome. And it’s great that you guys are having those conversations internally. I mean, my mind would immediately go to things like SkillBridge or, you know, leveraging some of those programs even to say, hey, maybe you could get someone for three of the six months, knock out some of that training, ramp them up—
Matt: We actually have—it’s funny. We actually hired somebody. Well, we don’t—he actually is going to finish his SkillBridge, but he’s already signed an offer letter for us to run one of our community facilities.
Actually, we have our pilot person who is a retired veteran, and he went through SkillBridge. And we’d gotten into that too—well, just because the timing didn’t work. So we’re like, that’s fine.
Well, we’re going to hold the job for him until March, which is fantastic. And we think he’s the right person, so why wouldn’t we?
Emily: That’s great.
Matt: And to lead one of these community facilities, it’s a smaller operation, but it’s to help folks who are out of a correctional setting before they’re fully kind of autonomous in that community.
And I really, really hope he does a bang-up job, and we can use him as a test case to say, hey, look here, let’s do more of that. And the leadership skills he has out of the gate are just tremendous. So we’re really excited. But that’s how we got to know him, because of SkillBridge—somebody introduced us to him.
Emily: OK, that’s fantastic. Yeah, there are so many interesting programs and ways that you can work with folks in the military to bridge those gaps. Because it’s something—I talked to a guy who had, I think, 20 years of logistics experience.
And he was trying to retire and transition out and interviewing for logistics jobs. And I mean, he had moved millions and millions, maybe even billions of dollars of all kinds of things all over the world.
And he couldn’t even get an interview with this food company because they said, well, you haven’t done any food logistics.
Matt: It’s crazy.
Emily: It’s like, well, yeah, but it’s different moving a loaf of bread and a tank, you know?
Matt: Right.
Emily: Translatable skills, guys. Like, that’s just so short-sighted to go, wow, if you have 20 years of logistics experience, could we not, you know, give you a little crash course on refrigerated trucking and then capture this incredible level of knowledge and skill set in our organization with someone who’s probably done things we’ve never dreamed of doing before and maybe could help us grow?
So I love that you guys are thinking outside the box, thinking creatively about how you can make space for folks. Because unfortunately, I think a lot of people in the military get overlooked for those kinds of opportunities because people just don’t know how to bridge that gap.
Matt: That’s right.
Emily: So that’s awesome that you’re doing that.
Matt: One question I had for you, and we got a shout-out from Tawfiq saying they’re doing great stuff.
Emily: I don’t know if you can see that on screen. Thank you!
Matt: Yeah. Thank you!
Emily Bose: That’s awesome. And I know before the show, we were talking a little bit about some of the programs that you guys have internally, like a veteran ERG program or those types of things. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you guys are doing with that?
Matt Lowney: So, yeah, we have three kinds of employee resource groups, and the most active is the military ERG, for all the reasons. Plus, Jason Medlin, one of our head field operations people, is retired military, very, very passionate. So he’s the sponsor for that, and he’s done kind of big pushes in many ways.
For example, when you start in a correctional facility—here in Middle Tennessee, we’re fortunate we have a corporate office, but we have a couple of correctional facilities within commutable range—but he’s like, how do we give credit for military service when you come in to be a correctional officer, right?
And so that essentially is your first job. Well, depending on what grade you came out, we actually do give you credit for time served. So you actually enter at a higher rank within CoreCivic, which is also more money. And the idea is giving credit for time in service.
We actually do get—I’ve got a whole grid, and I wish I could tell you like E-4 or E-5—and I know the different branches—but we do absolutely give credit for that. And I think that’s cool. That’s something Jason, who’s a head of ops and a retired veteran himself, pushed for hard.
It’s not just as simple as paying. We actually have to go to partners who agree to this because they’re the ones who are reimbursing us for people. So they have to go, yeah, that makes sense. And by the way, we might do that for our facilities.
And so between all these affinity groups, a lot of their focus is on building a community of networking and professional connectivity within the org. But a lot of it is an outshoot of how do we help attract people to the organization and how to retain those who have this background.
There’s a lot of ideas that come out of that. And sometimes it’s like, what can we support? Like, we’re going to redo the career site again and tell more military-specific stories. And that’s great. It’s not a hard thing to redo.
Emily: I’m glad that that’s at the core, and it connects all the way down to the frontline recruiter who’s telling the story to the candidate because they sat in their shoes, which I think is super important as well.
Matt: Absolutely. And we have some ideas on the forefront. I would love to figure out how I get somebody that has been a leader in the military to be a leader in a correctional setting and bridge that educational gap.
You can’t just walk in and be like, hey, I’m going to be a chief of unit management. But how far is that bridge, and how can we make it work? We’re talking about that actively with learning and development to kind of say, hey, why don’t we hire some folks, and they could come from this job in the military.
And we think in six months we can get them confident to do this job in a correctional setting and get them at a higher—more credit for time served, but also more value to us by leveraging their leadership skills. These are the kinds of ideas coming out of these ERGs.
Emily: That’s awesome. And it’s great that you guys are having those conversations internally. I mean, my mind would immediately go to things like SkillBridge or, you know, leveraging some of those programs even to say, hey, maybe you could get someone for three of the six months, knock out some of that training, ramp them up—
Matt: It’s funny you mention that because we actually hired somebody. Well, we don’t technically have him yet. He’s finishing his SkillBridge program, but he’s already signed an offer letter for us to run one of our community facilities.
Actually, he’s going to finish his SkillBridge, but we were so impressed that we’ve already offered him the job, and he’ll join us in March. It’s fantastic. And we think he’s the right person, so why wouldn’t we hold the job for him?
Emily: That’s great.
Matt: To lead one of these community facilities—it’s a smaller operation, but it’s to help folks who are out of a correctional setting before they’re fully kind of autonomous in the community.
I really, really hope he does a bang-up job, and we can use him as a test case to say, hey, let’s do more of that. The leadership skills he has out of the gate are just tremendous. So we’re really excited. But that’s how we got to know him—because of SkillBridge. Somebody introduced us.
Emily: That’s fantastic. Yeah, there are so many interesting programs and ways that you can work with folks in the military to bridge those gaps. Because it’s something—I talked to a guy who had, I think, 20 years of logistics experience.
And he was trying to retire and transition out and interviewing for logistics jobs. And I mean, he had moved millions and millions, maybe even billions of dollars of all kinds of things all over the world.
And he couldn’t even get an interview with this food company because they said, well, you haven’t done any food logistics.
Matt: It’s crazy.
Emily: It’s like, well, yeah, but it’s different moving a loaf of bread and a tank, you know?
Matt: Right.
Emily: Translatable skills, guys. Like, that’s just so short-sighted to go, wow, if you have 20 years of logistics experience, could we not, you know, give you a little crash course on refrigerated trucking and then capture this incredible level of knowledge and skill set in our organization with someone who’s probably done things we’ve never dreamed of doing before and maybe could help us grow?
So I love that you guys are thinking outside the box, thinking creatively about how you can make space for folks. Because unfortunately, I think a lot of people in the military get overlooked for those kinds of opportunities because people just don’t know how to bridge that gap.
Matt: That’s right.
Emily: So that’s awesome that you’re doing that.
Matt: Thanks!
Emily: Well, as we wrap up here, I wanted to ask you a bit about Nashville itself. I know you’ve been here for quite a while. How long have you been in the Nashville area?
Matt: Nine generations. We’re nine generations in Middle Tennessee, so we’re not going anywhere.
Emily: Wow! That’s amazing.
Matt: I’m a big fan, but I don’t know any better.
Emily: (laughs)
Matt: It’s been interesting to watch the growth of the last 15 years. I can see that. I think that actually has been both the attractor and the challenge as we are moving into this world of—it’s a more densely populated area.
I mean, you’ve got just mobility within the community as a challenge, but also cost of housing, like everywhere else, has skyrocketed. It’s a tangible challenge. But Middle Tennessee is a fantastic place to raise kids. Both my wife’s family and mine live within ten miles of us.
It’s awesome. It’s a great place to be from for family dynamics. And for folks who still want to avoid the density, you don’t have to drive far to find more affordable, rural communities.
Emily: That’s great to hear. It’s always so fascinating to hear how people experience the area differently. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join me and share more about what you’re doing at CoreCivic. I really appreciate it.
If anyone has questions, feel free to drop them in the comments, and I’m sure Matt would be happy to connect with anyone interested in learning more. Happy almost Thanksgiving!
Matt: Thank you, Emily. Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family.
Emily: Thanks so much! Take care, everyone, and I’ll see you next time on Landing Zone Nashville.
