Prisons and Mental Health: Violence, Organizational Support, and the Effects of Correctional Work

• Author: Amy E. Lerman,Meredith Sadin,Jessie Harney
• Date: 01 February 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00938548211037718
• Published date: 01 February 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, 2022, Vol. 49, No. 2, February 2022, 181 –199.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00938548211037718

Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions

© 2021 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology

181

PRISONS AND MENTAL HEALTH

Violence, Organizational Support, and the Effects of

Correctional Work

AMY E. LERMAN

JESSIE HARNEY

MEREDITH SADIN

University of California, Berkeley

Correctional workers have a high likelihood of exposure to violence in the workplace. However, empirical literature has

largely neglected the mental health consequences of prison work, as well as the institutional factors that might mitigate or

exacerbate these effects. To fill this gap, we employ original survey data on thousands of correctional officers to explore the

effects of exposure to violence on the job. We find strong associations between violence and symptoms of post-traumatic

stress disorder and suicide risk, as well as symptoms of depression, alcohol abuse, anxiety, and sleep disorder. Importantly,

we also find a potentially protective role of institutional factors, such as the quality of perceived management and supervision.

In line with the perceived organizational support (POS) model, our findings make clear that organizational support can mod-

erate the deleterious effects of prison work.

Keywords: mental health; corrections; prison violence; correctional officers

Correctional Officer Michael Van Patten has witnessed a great deal of violence in his line

of work. He has seen hangings and stabbings. He has also been assaulted, resulting in

his skull dislocating from his spine. Over time, the accumulation of this exposure to vio-

lence took a significant toll. As he described,

I didn’t know how to release the stuff I kept dreaming about. You’re doing tier count and

you’re watching a human being die in front of your eyes because he’s coughing up lungs and

screaming with his eyes for help and there’s nothing you can do.

AUTHORS’ NOTE: The authors are grateful to Anna Dubon and Andrea Yeung for their assistance during the

research process, to Rachel Bernhard for support with data collection, and to both the California Correctional

Peace Officers Association and CCPOA Benefit Trust Fund for their assistance with project implementation. We

are especially grateful to Stephen Walker for his support of this project, as well as for his unwavering commit-

ment to improving law enforcement health and wellness in the field. This research did not receive any specific

grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Correspondence concerning this

article should be addressed to Amy E. Lerman, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California,

Berkeley, 2607 Hearst Ave. #205A, Berkeley, CA 94720; e-mail: alerman@berkeley.edu.

1037718CJBXXX10.1177/00938548211037718Criminal Justice and BehaviorLerman et al. / Prison Mental Health: Effects of Correctional Work

research-article2021

182 CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR

When the mental stress became overwhelming, Van Patten attempted suicide. His son,

Trevor, found him at home, “crouching on the kitchen floor, gun in hand, a nearly empty

bottle of gin by his side, tears running down his cheeks” (Lisitsina, 2015).

Van Patten’s experiences are horrific, but they are not unique. One study found post-

traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms among correctional officers that were simi-

lar to those of combat veterans, disaster survivors, and prisoners of war (Stadnyk, 2003),

and some estimates put the suicide rate among correctional officers at as much as 39%

higher than the working-age population as a whole (Stack & Tsoudis, 1997). Yet while

there is growing consensus that exposure to violence can take a significant toll on the

mental health of people who are incarcerated (e.g., Haney, 2003; Massoglia, 2008;

Massoglia & Pridemore, 2015; Schnittker et al., 2012), we still know little about how

exposure to violence while working in prison might produce similarly severe outcomes

among correctional staff.

Even more critically, literature on interventions aimed at alleviating prison worker

stress is limited (Evers et al., 2020). Indeed, we have almost no systematic study of how

specific features of the correctional environment might affect officers’ health and well-

being. This limits our ability to gauge whether negative mental health outcomes are an

immutable feature of correctional work or whether mental health risks might instead be

mitigated through factors such as increased stress management training or improved

supervision and support.

To close these gaps, we employ data from an original, large-scale survey of correctional

personnel. The survey covers more than 8,400 law enforcement employees across California,

including roughly 4,300 officers who were working in the state’s adult prison institutions at

the time of the survey in 2017. Our data are unique in two important ways. First, the survey

asked a wide array of validated questions related to both workplace experiences and mental

health. This provides us with a nuanced picture of officers’ experiences. Second, respon-

dents are distributed across 33 different prisons in a single state. This allows us to leverage

wide institutional variation in the likelihood of exposure to violence and to assess the mod-

erating effects of institutional factors on a range of outcomes.

In our data, we find that exposure to violence is strongly associated with symptoms of

PTSD, suicide risk, and other negative mental health symptoms. These results remain con-

sistent even once we control for a range of potential confounders, including both officer

demographics and features of the prison environment. Importantly, we also find a protective

role of perceived organizational support (POS). Specifically, the data suggest that the more

positively officers perceive supervision and management, as well as the quality and avail-

ability of stress management training, the less likely they are to report mental health issues.

In fact, these factors appear to moderate the relationship between exposure to workplace

violence and negative mental health outcomes.

Our findings have important implications. Just as the incarcerated population in America

has skyrocketed, the number of employees in corrections has grown. From 1982 to 2003,

the number of people working in state corrections more than doubled. In fact, by the early

2000s, nearly 13% of all state and local public employees (and a larger percentage in 15

states) worked in criminal justice (Hughes, 2006). Our results suggest that, by largely ignor-

ing the effects of prison context on officer mental health, scholars may have underestimated

the collective social-psychological damage that has accumulated from more than a half-

century of mass incarceration in America.