Effective September 24, 2018, Dr. Lucas Malishchak was named director of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections' Psychology Office. He had been serving as acting director since October 2017, when former director Dr. Robert Marsh was named warden of Blair County Jail and later was named superintendent at SCI Benner Township.
As director of the Psychology Office, he is responsible for the oversight and direction of psychology services delivered in the PA DOC, including services provided to approximately 14,000 inmates and work performed by more than 300 mental health care professionals. Malishchak directly manages this centralized and statewide administrative oversight responsibility by supervising a team of four clinical psychologists (i.e., regional licensed psychologist managers) and a corrections treatment program services administrator.
Malishchak began his DOC career in November 2010 as a psychological services associate at SCI Dallas. One year later he promoted to that prison's psychological services specialist (PSS) and mental health coordinator. In both positions, he was responsible for providing mental health services and treatment to approximately 400 inmates. As PSS, his responsibilities grew to include performing evaluations, developing treatment plans, facilitating group sessions, and serving as a liaison with the DOC's mental health provider.
In June 2013, Malishchak was named corrections evaluation supervisor/mental health program manager at the DOC's Psychology Office. Here, he worked with a team of regional licensed psychologist managers to oversee the delivery of mental health services to DOC inmates. According to DOC statistics, more than 28 percent of the DOC's population requires some form of mental health services, and more than 8 percent of inmates are seriously mentally ill. In this position, Malishchak's responsibilities included providing oversight of mental health services delivered to all DOC inmates. In this role, he developed a statewide quality improvement mechanism to monitor compliance with a settlement agreement with the Disabilities Rights Network (now
Disability Rights Pennsylvania), who sued the department for what it believed was inadequate mental health services provided to seriously mentally ill inmates in restrictive housing units.
While working for the DOC in June 2016, Malishchak also served as an instructor for the National Institute of Corrections. Specifically, he was a national subject matter expert and instructor in mental health services for inmates housed in restrictive housing/administrative segregation units.
Prior to working for the DOC, Malishchak served as a therapeutic staff support, overall site supervisor, mobile therapist and behavioral specialist consultant for Children's Behavioral Health Services. During that time, he also served as an adjunct professor of psychology at Luzerne County Community College.
Malishchak earned a Bachelor of Arts in clinical psychology from Moravian College, a Master of Arts in psychology from Marywood University, and a Doctor of Business Administration, specializing in criminal justice from Northcentral University. Malishchak's doctoral dissertation was titled
Alternatives to Segregation and Seriously Mentally Ill Inmates in Pennsylvania State Prisons: A Case Study of Employee Perceptions.