New inspector general of Nebraska’s prison system talks challenges, transparency and recent restructuring

There’s a new top watchdog in Nebraska’s unique Office of the Inspector General of Corrections.

The office, which leads oversight efforts in the state’s prison and parole systems, has been led by Doug Koebernick since it was established by the Nebraska Legislature in 2015. After the office ran as a one-man operation for years, former journalist and legislative aide Zach Pluhacek was hired as an assistant inspector general in 2020.

Koebernick moved to a new role as a performance auditor at the Legislative Audit Office in February, and Pluhacek was named the interim inspector general of corrections. In April, he dropped the interim title and began the process of hiring an assistant inspector general to fill his former role.

In addition to investigating every death and serious injury that takes place in the prison system, the office also releases reports on matters of public interest – like the 2022 cervical cancer death of a woman incarcerated at the Nebraska Correctional Center for Women, and the continued practice of “double-bunking” inmates in restrictive housing settings.

Molly Ashford spoke with Pluhacek about his goals leading the office, and how work has changed after a controversial opinion from the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office in 2023 that led to the office losing all access for about six months.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Molly Ashford: For people who aren’t familiar, can you explain what the role of the Inspector General’s office is?

Zach Pluhacek: The Inspector General’s office provides accountability, mostly in the form of transparency, for the Legislature and the public, for the state corrections system in Nebraska. So that’s prisons and parole. There’s also the Inspector General of Child Welfare, who has oversight of the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

My office – I’m still getting used to calling it my office – is required to investigate any death or serious injury in the prison system or of someone on parole. Those investigations aren’t criminal investigations. Our job is not to look for wrongdoing by any one person, it’s more about how the system worked or didn’t work, and making recommendations for how to improve the system, either through changes within departmental policies and processes, or changes to the law, if necessary. We also have the authority to investigate complaints. We don’t investigate every complaint, and there’s criteria in the law for what kinds of complaints we’re supposed to investigate. We prioritize those based on a variety of factors.

And then there’s this kind of less-explicit expectation that we’re really just monitoring the system as a whole, and looking at what issues might be percolating bigger picture, and then reporting those back to the Legislature. Just keeping them aware of how things are going generally, and then looking into broader issues that we see emerging within the system.

Ashford: You worked under Doug Koebernick for the last five years. What did you learn from him as a boss?

Pluhacek: I owe Doug so much. For anybody who's ever met Doug, I mean, he's a fantastic person [who] cares tremendously about people and about this state. Doug worked without me for five years, so he was the first inspector general at a time when I think there was a really big gap in trust between the public and the Department of Corrections, and just the corrections system as a whole. And Doug spent a lot of time just kind of as a fly on the wall in the prisons, and his depth of knowledge from that and from just working in the Legislature for many years is incredible. He's been a huge mentor to me.

Ashford: How are you approaching trying to fill his shoes? And is there anything you want to change about the way that the office is run?

Pluhacek: I will say that, even when I was an assistant, it was a bit of a challenge scaling up from even an office of one to an office of two. Because when you’re a one-man operation, you can kind of just make decisions and they only apply to you, and you’re just sort of doing things as you feel that they make sense. That communication within the office isn’t as important. Fortunately, Doug and I had worked together sort of unofficially within the Legislature for a couple years before that, so we had a pretty good rapport already. But for me, really formalizing the office operations has been a big part of this, because whoever I hire to replace me as an assistant is unlikely to have that same rapport that Doug and I had. So we’ll have to have a little more of a clear system.

And then we’re still dealing with a little bit of – I don’t want to say fallout, but the changes that resulted from the attorney general opinion that affected our office a couple years ago. So continuing that work, which Doug had started, into sort of Inspector General 2.0 is what I’ve been focused on.

Ashford: That is something I wanted to ask you about. I wonder if you could just back up and explain what happened with that attorney general opinion, how it was resolved and what the residual effects of that are now.

Pluhacek: There was an opinion from the Attorney General of Nebraska that found that portions of our office laws were unconstitutional. I’m not an attorney, I should preface this, so this is a tricky thing for me to describe, and I want to make sure I’m not mischaracterizing anything. In the very immediate aftermath of that, we lost all of our access to facilities, people and information related to the corrections system. It was a very challenging time. Fortunately, we had the support of the Legislature, and I can’t thank Speaker [John] Arch enough for what he did to both, in the short term and the long term, restore our access so we could get back to work.

It was a disruptive time. It was a very challenging time professionally and, frankly, even emotionally for the people in the office. Over the course of many months, there were negotiations between the Legislature and the executive branch on how to get this back to something that everybody could agree on would work. And last year, in the spring of 2025, the Legislature passed a complete redo of our act. A lot of the language is the same. The big changes were that they moved us under this Legislative Oversight Committee, which is a committee of – many of them are very highly placed senators, committee chairs, and leadership within the body who more-or-less supervise our work.

They have given our offices a tremendous amount of discretion to continue doing what we need to do. Our access has essentially been completely restored to what it was before. There’s some changes. Some for better, some maybe a little more limiting. But on the whole, I would say it’s comparable.

Ashford: Obviously, you have to kind of tackle issues as they come up. But are there any big picture things within the prison system that you want to be sure to explore during your tenure?

Pluhacek: I’ll give you two – one is sort of wonky, and one’s not. So the not wonky one is healthcare and mental healthcare. I think we’re all probably aware that is a challenge for the prison system. It’s a challenge for a lot of prison systems. I think there’s broad agreement that those could be improved, staffing for health care and mental health care in particular. The big challenge there, the question, is how do we do that? I think that’s going to be a major focus of this office, and probably the Legislature and the Department of Corrections, until it gets resolved.

The wonky answer is: How do we measure success of prisons and the corrections system as a whole? I think that’s a national conversation. One thing that changed with our laws being changed was the adoption of a requirement that we work on ‘key performance indicators.’ That’s something that is a focus of mind right now – what are the key indicators of performance for our prison system? How do we measure those? How do we make sure that information isn’t just being presented in a way that’s the most positive it can be for the department? How do we verify what we’re given? What are those measures?