Secretary John Wetzel

John Wetzel was appointed Secretary of Corrections for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections in January 2011 by then-Governor Tom Corbett and was reappointed by Governor Tom Wolf in January 2015. Wetzel has presided over the first prison population reduction in Pennsylvania in more than four decades, a restructuring of the community corrections and mental health systems, and a re-engineering of internal processes to yield a more efficient program delivery. He has nearly 30 years of experience in the corrections field, including as a corrections officer, treatment counselor, warden, and training academy director. He is a member of the Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections, which is focused on reducing prison populations. He is also a member of Harvard’s Executive Session on Community Corrections, which is a joint project of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the National Institute of Justice that works to shape the future of community corrections policy in the United States. He is a graduate of Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania and, in May 2016, was presented with an honorary doctorate degree by the Indiana University of Pennsylvania.