About Cameron

Cameron Lindsay has over 30 years experience in the criminal justice field as a police officer, college instructor, and correctional administrator.  He was a police officer for five years, taught criminal justice full-time and part-time at six colleges/universities, and worked 25 years in nine correctional facilities, both in the public and private sectors. He was a member of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Senior Executive Service at the time of his retirement from the Federal Bureau of Prisons.  Over the course of his 25 years in corrections, he served as warden for 12 years at five facilities, including three prisons and two jails. He holds a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, a master’s of arts degree in counseling and guidance, and a master’s of science degree in safety management.

While the services that CLCS provides are diverse, his primary goal is to provide professionals—especially those in the criminal justice ranks—methods for effectively and realistically dealing with their stress, improving their interpersonal skills, and learning how to integrate the basic concepts of effective dispute resolution into their personal and professional lives.  Expected outcomes of CLCS training include improved teamwork and cooperation, fewer negative contacts such as uses-of-force, a reduction in occurrences of excessive uses-of-force, fewer citizen complaints, fewer administrative remedy requests, etc.

Cameron Lindsay was born and raised in Morgantown, West Virginia. He graduated from Morgantown High School in 1977 where he earned five letters in football, wrestling, and baseball. He was a dispatcher for the West Virginia State Police on the “graveyard” shift for three years while attending Fairmont State College, where he earned a bachelor’s of science degree in criminal justice and played baseball. Cam then became sworn police officer with the Star City Police Department and, during his time there, graduated from the 13-week in-residence basic police academy for West Virginia county and municipal officers, located at the West Virginia State Police Academy in Institute, West Virginia. Cam then was hired by the Morgantown Police Department in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Over the course of the next three years, Cam worked in the patrol division, the traffic division (as a motorcycle officer), and the detective division. He was also one of the first two officers designated as the Morgantown Police Department’s “Officer Friendly,” which created two foot-patrol positions, primarily designed to interact with West Virginia University students and reduce the number and severity of alcohol-related acts of violence in the Sunnyside area of Morgantown. While working as a police officer, Cam earned a master’s degree of arts in counseling and guidance from West Virginia University.

In 1987, Cam left police work for academia, when he was hired at his alma mater, Fairmont State College, as a full-time, tenure-track, instructor of criminal justice. Cam taught Police Operations, Criminal Investigation, Group Counseling, and Introduction to Criminal Justice. He also simultaneously earned a second master’s degree (of science) in safety management from West Virginia University. He taught full-time for two years when, in 1989, he was hired by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Over the next twenty years, Cam worked in a variety of positions of increasing responsibility in seven federal prisons located in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, California, and New York City. In 2002, he was promoted to warden at the Federal Correctional Institution, Lompoc, California. He was later selected as the first warden of the United States Penitentiary, Canaan, Pennsylvania, where he was appointed by the attorney general of the United States to the Senior Executive Service. Cam was then selected as warden of the Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn, New York, where he served for nearly three years and retired from the federal government in 2009.

Cam then moved into the privatization side of corrections, when he has hired as warden of the Moshannon Valley Correctional Center, in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, which is a privately-owned prison, contracted to house illegal federal detainees. After nearly three years at Moshannon Valley, Cam accepted an offer to serve as warden of the Delaware County Prison also known as the George W. Hill Correctional Facility, in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania. Cam was in this role for nearly two years when he retired as a “correctional practitioner” in August 2014.

In short, Cam has worked in the criminal justice system virtually all of his adult life, having been warden of five facilities—three prisons and two jails—over the course of 25 years in corrections. He has taught part-time at five colleges/universities, most recently (2011) at the Pennsylvania State University in State College, Pennsylvania.