Richard Stalder

Richard Lee Stalder (born March 23, 1951) is the former secretary of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections, a position to which he was appointed in 1992 by then-Governor Edwin W. Edwards. The position is now held by James M. LeBlanc, Stalder's former colleague. 

Stalder is one of four children of Edgar A. Stalder, who died on his 92nd birthday on December 13, 2015, and the former Mildred A. Strahm (also born 1923) of Topeka, Kansas. Edgar Stalder was reared on a farm along the Kansas-Nebraska border. Stalder has three siblings, Robert Stalder and his wife, Pattie, of Westmoreland, Kansas; Ronald Stalder of Austin, Texas, and Susan Brinker and her husband, Brian, of Stillwater, Oklahoma. 

After distinguished service under General George S. Patton, with the United States Army in World War II,  he received the Silver Star and was recognized by the historian Stephen E. Ambrose with the placing of Stalder's war memoir at both the Eisenhower Center of the University of New Orleans and in the National World War II Museum in Washington, D.C. He worked for the United States Department of Agriculture in New Orleans and later Washington, D.C. 

In 1971, Stalder began working as a prison officer to earn money while he was attending Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He worked his way to the positions of federal programs administrator, corrections budget officer, and the superintendent of Louisiana Training Institute in Monroe, Louisiana, deputy warden of Dixon Correctional Institute in Jackson, Louisiana, and warden of David Wade Correctional Center in Homer. 

From 1998 to 2000, Stalder was the president of the American Correctional Association. He was the choice of a new group founded in 1991 and known as Louisiana Wardens and Superintendents (LAWS) to head the corrections agency. The driving force behind LAWS was Burl Cain, a long-term warden at Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, under whom Stalder had previously worked as deputy warden at the Dixon Correctional Institute. Stalder was at first reluctant to take on the statewide position because he preferred to remain warden at David Wade Correctional Institute, the only prison in Louisiana at the time to have been accredited by the American Correctional Association. Stalder's colleagues persuaded him to meet with Edwards, then a candidate for a fourth nonconsecutive term as governor, to discuss the secretary's position. After some delay, Edwards appointed Stalder; the position had been traditionally given to political supporters of the governor.

Stalder is a registered Republican voter in East Baton Rouge Parish. In 2003, he was inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield. Burl Cain was inducted into the Hall of Fame the previous year in 2002. 

Stalder resides in Zachary with his wife, Pamela Davis (also born 1951). The couple has two sons, Jonathan Eli Stalder (born 1978) and Christopher Davis Stalder (born 1981).