Comes with the Territory
Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) can be of great help to staff who struggle with substance abuse issues. In my counseling practice with corrections staff over the past nine years, I have noted an additional area of need which crops us frequently with corrections personnel—that of posttraumatic stress. In fact, these two areas of substance abuse and psychological traumatization may well be interrelated. The “dual” (double) diagnosis literature indicates that oftentimes substances, such as alcohol, are the tool people abuse to “muffle” (self-medicate) their posttraumatic symptoms and make them more tolerable for a short while.1
Posttraumatic stress takes a heavy toll on body, soul, and spirit of survivors.1 In addition to substance abuse, untreated posttraumatic stress may contribute to high turnover, sick leave, and early disability retirement in corrections. And it may be at least partly responsible for the high suicide rates among corrections staff.2
At the very least, unaddressed posttraumatic symptoms affect job performance adversely. Irritable and tense staff are more likely to react to inmates’ taxing behavior and get into arguments with them. They may also become more predictable in their way of handling things and thus more prone to manipulation.
Sometimes the unsuspecting targets of staff’s posttraumatic turmoil are family members, friends or coworkers. Spouses may be the primary recipients of verbal or even physical aggression. This happens when staff members get home day after day without decompressing from “combat mode” following shifts where their posttraumatic buttons were pushed—such as after breaking up fights among inmate gang members.
Why are corrections professionals vulnerable to psychological traumatization? Like other law enforcement personnel—and, it can be argued, perhaps more than other law enforcement personnel3—corrections staff are exposed to potentially life-threatening and horrifying situations more than the average citizen. Some of these events would be characterized as critical incidents and some not. (In the former case a Critical Incident Stress Debriefing team may be sent to a facility. In the latter, potentially traumatic events are treated as part of the job. Staff tend to just dust themselves off and keep on going.)
In the course of their careers, correctional staff may be exposed to a variety of traumatic incidents: being assaulted; witnessing the gruesome injury or murder of staff members (”That could have been me!”); being taken hostage, raped and tortured; or being caught in an inmate riot. Additionally, staff may have to cut down inmates who have hanged themselves and perform CPR on lifeless bodies. Staff that rush to a disturbance might come upon the horrific sight of an inmate stomped to death or disemboweled by other inmates. Or they may be part of the team overseeing an inmate’s execution.
Observations in war time have shown that even the “toughest of the tough” can be affected. Psychiatrists have come up with a plethora of names describing the outcome of exposure to horror, danger, helplessness, and death. Shell shock (World War I), war neurosis (World War II), post-traumatic stress disorder (Vietnam war), and combat stress reaction (1982 Israeli Lebanon war) are all labels coined to denote the symptoms observed.4
The corrections culture has typically tended to leave the issue of staff traumatization unaddressed. Being “tough” is a requirement for the job and a badge of honor for correctional officers (COs). COs who have gone through life-threatening experiences or who have witnessed gore may be treated by colleagues with the unspoken expectation that they should remain unaffected by the ordeal. (”Oh, it was just an inmate!” “They had it coming!”)
Yet sometimes nothing could be farther from the truth. COs do get affected. A traumatic event can have a lasting biological, psychological, spiritual and social impact on them. Corrections staff are human beings who, like the rest of us, are influenced by the incidents to which they are exposed. COs too go through a complex inner process in their attempts to adapt after their exposure to traumatic stressors.
Ultimately, whether a person is traumatized or not after experiencing a potentially traumatic event—and the degree and manner of their traumatization—are the result of a complex interplay between the characteristics of the event, the characteristics of the individual person, and the characteristics of their socio-cultural context.
My ultimate goal in discussing this subject is that of increased understanding and empowerment of traumatized corrections staff and their loved ones so they can reclaim their lives through effective support and treatment interventions.
REFERENCES
1 van der Kolk, B.A. (1996). The Complexity of Adaptations to Trauma. In B.A. van der Kolk, A.C. McFarlane, & L. Weisaeth (Eds), Traumatic Stress. New York: The Guilford Press.
2 Stack, S.J., & Tsoudis, O. (1997). Suicide risk among correctional officers: A logistical regression analysis. Archives of Suicide Research, 3(3), 183-186
3 Finn, P., Talucci, V. & Wood, J. (2000). On-the-Job Stress in Policing—Reducing It, Preventing It. National Institute of Justice Journal, January 2000, p.24
4 van der Kolk, B.A., Weisaeth, L., & van der Hart, O. (1996). History of Trauma in Psychiatry. In B.A. van der Kolk, A.C. McFarlane, & L. Weisaeth (Eds), Traumatic Stress. New York: The Guilford Press.
