Stress: The Workplace Time Bomb
It was not the stress of a hostage crisis at the Waupun Correctional Institution in Wisconsin several years ago that got to CO Robert McLinn, president of AFSCME Local 18 (Council 24). What got to him, he says, was the suicide of a storekeeper who “couldn’t cope” shortly after the incident at the maximum-security prison.
The storekeeper managed to get through the hostage incident without physical injury. Inside, however, something had snapped.
The suicide “had a tremendous impact” on him, McLinn says. But there was no program at the time to help McLinn deal with the resulting stress. Today, the prison has a “Critical Incident Stress Program” and also — for less-dramatic but-no-less-important causes of stress — an employee assistance program to direct COs and other prison workers to psychological resources outside the institution.
Correctional facilities have begun taking stress much more seriously. So has the federal government. To learn more about the problem, the Department of Justice is about to spend $830,000 in a grant program, administered by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ).
Stress and the CO
More is understood about stress among police officers and their families than among COs, according to the NIJ. That’s partly because police officers, in NIJ’s words, “routinely report stressors such as unpredictable child care needs, increasing media scrutiny, public criticism, threats of lawsuits, inadequate equipment or training, and certain aspects of police culture.”
In a correctional environment, for example, there are obvious causes of stress: prison takeovers, inmate riots and suicides of co-workers. But stress in that environment, the NIJ says, “may also be associated with chronic understaffing and overtime work, role conflict or ambiguity, threatened or actual inmate violence, low public recognition, low pay and difficult employee relations, among other issues.”
Sadly, however, major crises are not the biggest stressors in the correctional environment, experts say. “It’s the everyday stresses that kill us,” says Roger Johnson of the Northeastern New York Safety & Health Council, who conducted a stress seminar last August at the fourth annual ACU Congress in Madison, Wis. “It’s the small rocks in the road that drive a car off the road, not necessarily big boulders that come along once or twice in an officer’s lifetime.”
Johnson, a former detective, says prison takeovers and other major crises create their own support mechanisms within the institution and among family and friends. “When something dramatic has happened, at least in the last 10 years or so ... I think there’s been enough support for the officer and his or her family. But if you address just those things that are a result of a critical incident, you’re missing the boat.”
Traditionally, COs have been expected to handle routine stress as part of their daily responsibilities. Consequently, they often don’t share their problems outside the institution until a crisis has erupted.
“For better or worse, corrections officers and cops see themselves differently from other people,” Johnson explains. “I think a lot of our guys feel you don’t understand the prison until you’ve had [excrement] thrown on you by an inmate and you can’t retaliate.”
Finding a Safe Zone
COs also have not been able to discuss stress with superiors without risking their careers. So finding help through a person that protects their privacy is critical to them.
Some correctional institutions, aware of the need for help away from the job, contract with programs outside the prison walls. One such program is headed by John Carr, a decorated FBI-trained crisis negotiator and clinical director of the stress management units of the Rhode Island Department of Corrections and the Coventry, R.I., police department.
Carr emphasizes the right to confidentiality. “You will never hear of an officer having his integrity, credibility, right to privacy or professionalism being compromised because of his contact with a stress unit,” he told attendees to the American Correctional Association’s 129th Congress in Denver in August.
On only two occasions, he said, is privacy a secondary consideration: when someone is at risk to themselves or to others.
Before a CO can seek help, however, he or she has to acknowledge that a problem exists. Johnson says that’s not easy:
“I think there’s a defense mechanism that once you start complaining about the job, the job is getting to you, and you worry about doing the job.”
Denial seems better, or at least easier. As McLinn puts it, “There are things you cope with until they get to a point where you set them aside and walk away. They become part of you.”
Sometimes, of course, the stress cannot be ignored. “We do see members of our department’s officer corps because they got their head broken in a facility disorder,” Carr acknowledged. “But nine times out of 10 we don’t see people following a disturbance. Instead, we see them coming to us saying, ‘I don’t feel I’m cared for, loved, appreciated, respected — nobody gives a damn. My life is out of control.’”
Stress Is Everywhere
“The scope of stress within corrections runs throughout the food chain,” Carr said bluntly. “I don’t care if you’re a recruit. I don’t care if you’re a deputy warden.” In fact, “We are more lethal to ourselves than a felon is to us, and that is outrageous. Despite the best efforts of myself and my colleagues, in my state in fiscal 1998, we lost three members of the service” to suicide.
What can be done?
The first step is to recognize that there are people willing to help and “getting help can’t be any more difficult or painful than what [the stressed-out officer] feels now,” said Carr.
“The bottom line for our program, despite 14 pages of policy, is very simple,” he concluded. “You have a problem and you get help, you keep your career. If you have a problem and you do not get help, and you get worse and you act out your problem, that can cost you your career” and maybe your life.
