Abstract
Organizational stress (i.e., structural aspects of the organization such as excessive workload, shiftwork, gossip) has long been found by public safety personnel to be more impactful on their health and wellness than operational stress (i.e., inherent stresses of the job such as altercations, intervention in suicide behaviors). In the current study, which engages semi-structured interviews conducted with 28 correctional officers employed at one provincial prison in Atlantic Canada, we unpack through a lens of moral distress four prevalent sources of organizational stress among correctional officers that emerged in the data without categories precogitated, with a focus on participant experiences and expressed similarities across accounts: (1) management, (2) staff retention, (3) training needs, (4) lack of mental health support. Findings indicate organizational stress has a significant impact on correctional officers and these sources of organizational stress are exacerbated by officers’ moral and ethical vulnerabilities emergent from their conditions of employment. We recommend several practical changes to ease the strains and moral harms felt by correctional officers and better support their mental health and well-being, such as increasing staffing levels, providing more education and training opportunities for frontline officers and senior leaders, and providing more adequate mental health support for correctional officers.
Introduction
In the context of public safety work, organizational stress refers to the context of the occupation (i.e., structural aspects of the organization such as excessive workload; see McCreary et al., 2017), while operational stress refers to the inherent stresses of the job (i.e., critical incidents such as witnessing/experiencing harm and violence; see McCreary et al., 2017). Organizational stress has long been found by public safety personnel (e.g., firefighters, paramedics, police officers, correctional officers) to be equally, if not more, impactful on health and wellness than operational stress (Duxbury et al., 2015; Ricciardelli, 2018; Ricciardelli & Johnston, 2022), including in correctional services (Norman & Ricciardelli, 2022). Operationally, previous research (predominately examining correctional officers [COs] from the United States and Canada) has demonstrated COs are differentially exposed to violence, potentially psychologically traumatic events, 1 and both fatal and nonfatal work-related injury (Brower, 2013; Konda et al., 2012; Ricciardelli et al., 2023; Spinaris et al., 2012; Steiner & Wooldredge, 2015; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022), which often stem from responses to critical incidents on the job (i.e., violence, threats, self-injury, death, fatal accidents; Ricciardelli et al., 2023). Still, empirical studies continue to reassert findings detailing the harmful nature of organizational stress on CO health and wellness, for both correctional service providers employed in the community (i.e., parole/probation officers; Norman & Ricciardelli, 2022; Ricciardelli et al., 2022b) and in institutions (i.e., COs; Ricciardelli & Power, 2020).
Research evaluating the psychological well-being of COs is growing, but remains, in some respect, limited, especially in the Canadian context (Regehr et al., 2021). COs also report higher prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, and general anxiety disorder than people within the general Canadian population (Carleton et al., 2018, 2020). For example, provincial COs in Ontario, Canada, prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, reported a prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder at 29.1%, 31.1% for major depressive disorder, 23.6% for generalized anxiety disorder, 12.2% for panic disorder, and 6.8% for alcohol use disorder. Moreover, 48.4% reported the prevalence of any mental health disorder (Carleton et al., 2020).
Throughout the course of their duties, public safety personnel are routinely exposed to human suffering and must make quick, morally challenging decisions, which can also affect their well-being (Lentz et al., 2021). Yet the impacts of moral harms on officer mental health have yet to be studied in-depth. A recent scoping review found public safety organizations appear to recognize the experience of moral distress or moral injury among public safety personnel—police officers, firefighters, and paramedics in particular—that results from strong disconnects between personal core values, organizational values, vocational duties, and expectations (Lentz et al., 2021). As Ricciardelli et al. (2024, pp. x) write: COs describe how their view of prison—such as a facilitating rehabilitative philosophy and/or the lack of consequences for harmful actions—creates a space conducive to moral frustration and distress. They find it difficult that people often apparently “want” to be in prison—that despite the hardship in prison some people prefer prison living to free society—and find it incomprehensible that people do not take advantage of the opportunities afforded in prison, and how there is no consequence when harm occurs. Perhaps they feel duped in entering the profession because this reality is unclear prior, as they feel entering the field they will make a difference in the lives of PWAI [people who are incarcerated] as they prepare to re-enter society as law abiding citizens…. The realities of prison work then appear to accumulate into frustration, a frustration informed by their morals, where injury may occur as they lay witness to the realities of individual choices in their lifestyles and rehabilitative interests.
Much of the prison literature reiterates how correctional occupational culture informs workplace relations, experiences, and perceptions of wellness, both positive and negative (Arnold et al., 2007; Crichton & Ricciardelli, 2016; Johnston et al., 2022, 2024; Liebling et al., 2010; Ricciardelli, 2019; Ricciardelli & Power, 2020); yet to date, beyond the structural and cultural dimensions, there is little examination of how moral challenges, frustrations, dilemmas, distress, and injuries underpin experiences with (very pronounced) organizational stress. However, we know the mental health of COs can be informed by the psychological and emotional demands of the job (Ghaddar et al., 2008). In the current study, which engages semi-structured interviews conducted with 28 COs employed at one prison in Atlantic Canada, we unpack through a lens of moral distress four prevalent sources of organizational stress among COs employed in the institution: (1) management, (2) staff retention, (3) training needs, and (4) lack of mental health support to illustrate how these—arguably changeable—phenomena cast negative perceptions of and experiences with officer wellness, and raise moral and ethical vulnerabilities and dilemmas. Since the initial purpose of the study was to explore COs’ ideas on new and old prison design, we emphasize these sources of organizational stress were emergent themes tied to broader moral and ethical challenges of working in a prison and not the result of direct inquiry. We discuss the relationship between mental health, moral distress, and organizational stress while putting forth recommendations for change.
Organizational Stress
In the public safety realm broadly, organizational stress materializes through diverse aspects of the occupation itself, such as “excessive work load; frequent time pressures; lack of control over how the job is performed; conflicting role requirements; ambiguity about how one is supposed to perform their duties; workplace incivility, the impact of the job on a person's social relationships including work-family conflict; and constraints placed on employees by the organization itself (also referred to as hindrance stressors), such as lack of appropriate equipment, and information training” (McCreary et al., 2017, p. 613). Organizational stressors, in this context, may compound in ways that drastically decrease employees’ physical and mental health, job satisfaction, job motivation, and job performance (Anderson et al., 2015).
Early studies in this field emphasized how correctional workers in particular—namely those employed in the community—often experience a variety of organizational stressors that negatively affect their well-being, such as inadequate training, unanticipated deadlines, staff shortages, a lack of administrative support, perceptions their work is undervalued, issues with paperwork and caseloads, and difficulties navigating technology (DiMichele & Payne, 2007; Farrow, 2004; Finn & Kuck, 2005; Morran, 2008; Simmons et al., 1997; Slate et al., 2003; West & Seiter, 2004). We emphasize these concerns, to varying degrees, can also be experienced by correctional officers working in institutions or overlap with other concerns. For example, recently, Ricciardelli and Power (2020) found that COs employed in Atlantic Canada identified a number of organizational stressors impacting their mental health, including a work culture that discourages visible emotional responses to operational stressors (i.e., generalized violence among incarcerated people, direct and vicarious violence, ongoing harassment), a lack of support from management, and inadequate procedures for dealing with workplace violence and harassment. Organizational factors impacting officer wellness also include being short/under-staffed, prison overcrowding, and deteriorating prison conditions (Jessiman-Perreault et al., 2021). Shift work, critical incident exposure, vulnerabilities generated from unpredictable situations, and a general sense of uncertainty may also negatively impact CO well-being (Johnston et al., 2024; Ricciardelli et al., 2023).
When federally employed COs in Canada were asked about their most significant work stress, Cassiano and Ricciardelli (2023) found officers with at least 1 year of occupational tenure reported colleagues were more stressful than either management or people in custody. In addition, shiftwork, particularly night shifts, can contribute to a higher prevalence of fatigue and burnout which may underpin negative behavioral changes, delayed reaction time, and distraction, therefore undermining institutional safety and security (Swenson et al., 2008). Restrictions on the parameters of discretion, which informs every decision made, are also a source of stress (Ricciardelli, 2022b). For instance, the combination of occupational responsibilities that must be actioned in line with legislative requirements or managerial directives and the investigative potential that can follow any action creates stress and may prevent or impact officers’ actions. In other words, officers have imposed restrictions on their decision-making processes because they are always vulnerable to investigation, including criminal liability, which may subsequently create job strain (Bourbonnais et al., 2007; Ricciardelli, 2022b).
Other research points to how correctional workers in diverse roles may experience stigma in their workplaces in relation to their mental health status or concerns, which can serve as a barrier to treatment and help-seeking (Johnston et al., 2024; Johnston & Ricciardelli, 2023; Ricciardelli et al., 2020). Currently, too few support systems exist for COs in Canada. Despite a lack of supports, when such supports do exist, Jessiman-Perreault et al. (2021) note that to be effective at reducing the effects of job strain, programming must use targeted interventions which address both the individual needs of COs and the structural demands of their workplace. Furthermore, just as workplace culture informs officer mental health (Arnold et al., 2007; Crichton & Ricciardelli, 2016; Johnston et al., 2022, 2024; Liebling et al., 2010; Ricciardelli, 2019; Ricciardelli & Power, 2020), so too does the training and needs of the profession. For example, COs must often embody a stoic exterior (Ricciardelli, 2017; Ricciardelli & McKendy, 2020)—they cannot personally and/or emotionally react to all that transpires given their professional role as a first responder in situations of crisis. Thus, officers are asked to “bottle” emotions rather than present emotions. Here, displaying emotions or asking for support can sometimes be seen by managers, colleagues, and incarcerated people as a sign of weakness (Ricciardelli & Power, 2020). The challenge, then, is how do officers ask for support when they are trained to suppress feelings that might reveal such need? This reality, we argue, must be incorporated into any support programming developed for officers.
Noteworthy, however, are questions related to how improving conditions for incarcerated people will have beneficial health outcomes for COs, just as improving conditions for officers will benefit incarcerated people. Johnston and Ricciardelli (2024) found that “many correctional workers identified that improving rehabilitative, recreational, and mental health care for prisoners or probationers would reduce struggles and conflict among both staff and clients/prisoners” (p. 7). Thus, there is a reciprocity underpinning support for incarcerated people and correctional staff such that it creates a more humane place for people to live and work. This is most evident in how incarcerated people's needs are constitutive of the occupational needs of COs, who are the “lifeline” of people in custody and serve to meet their needs. Correctional organizations must both consider how best to improve the living conditions of incarcerated people and the working conditions of staff, as such a gap between the two levels of care, in the current study, have produced several moral and ethical challenges among COs.
Linking Organizational Stress to Moral Frustration, Distress, and Injury
Moral challenges are part and parcel of everyday life; they may be instigated by organizational stresses where people feel conflicted morally by organizational demands and refer to experiences that may not necessarily directly impact day-to-day functioning but nonetheless affect emotional responses and health (Jameton, 1984). People experience moral challenges on a continuum (Litz & Kerig, 2019), whereby individuals may become morally frustrated or feel a sense of contempt and annoyance in ways that do not have a significant effect on their well-being, to more serious experiences of moral distress, referring to a serious form of psychological distress related to being in a situation where one believes they cannot act on what one knows to be right (Jameton, 1984). Moral distress can lead to moral harm or moral injury, which refers to experiences wherein an individual does, or fails to do, something that violates their morals, ethics, or personal values (Litz et al., 2009; Williamson et al., 2021). Moral injury often leads to feelings of betrayal concerning what is the “right” course of action by people in a position of legitimate authority over them, or by themselves (Ricciardelli et al., 2022a). Beyond betrayal, pronounced symptoms and consequences of moral injury may include burnout, mental health challenges such as posttraumatic stress disorder, guilt, shame, spiritual-existential crisis, loss of trust, depression, anxiety, anger, self-harm, and other health, emotional, social, and organizational problems (Ricciardelli et al., 2022a; Stovall et al., 2020; Williamson et al., 2021).
Reflecting on organizational stresses, moral injury can result from occupational demands such as a reduction in the time for officers to do what they feel is necessary for the people in their custody, to how they are treated by colleagues or superiors, or even from watching prisoners elect not to engage in rehabilitation programs offered to them. For COs working within prison societies, moral injury may manifest from a variety of other experiences. For instance, from being forced to take actions that conflict with COs’ moral beliefs, to witnessing inaction of others resulting in harm, to experiencing betrayals from trusted colleagues or the carceral system at large (i.e., enacting demands from management that violate trust with incarcerated people, such as the application of punitive measures; Ricciardelli et al., 2024). These realities weigh on officer wellness, impacting their mental health and creating exhaustion and stress.
Recently, Ricciardelli et al. (2024) found COs experience moral harm, frustration, and distress through individual stresses, like the discrepancies created between their perceived purpose of prison and its lived realities (e.g., the disjuncture between facilitating rehabilitative spaces versus enforcing consequences for harmful actions). Operationally, participants felt at odds trying to help incarcerated people prepare to re-enter society as law-abiding citizens yet witnessing many incarcerated people “want” to be in prison and not take advantage of rehabilitative opportunities or other resources conducive to their well-being, health, and safety. Beyond individual and operational stresses, emerging findings point to a need to further understand how organizational stressors in correctional workplaces constitute a source of moral frustration or distress, and consequently may be experienced as potentially morally injurious.
Method
The findings presented in this article are part of a larger study that sought to investigate the perspectives of COs regarding prison design and what they consider to be essential considerations for the construction of a new provincial penitentiary being constructed to replace the institution under study. We do not share any further details about the prison to protect participants’ identities. The themes identified in the current article are emergent insofar as we did not ask specific questions around organizational stress or moral distress, but these themes surfaced throughout many of our conversations. Moreover, our analysis is supported by ethnographic experience with the officers where the moral challenge is evidenced through actions, body language, and expressed considerations (i.e., why did an incarcerated person/colleague do this or that when other actions were possible?). We deployed qualitative methods to gather and analyze data, which included 28 semi-structured interviews with COs employed in Atlantic Canada. Emerging from conversations with participants were many themes tied to current stressors in the workplace, many of which were organizational in nature and thus created the impetus for the current study, and more specifically, advanced one research question: How, if at all, do COs experience organizational stress as a moral challenge?
The participants’ union assisted the research team with recruitment by emailing study information to its members via internal listservs. All officers employed at the prison are members of the union and thus were invited to participate. Several participants also aided in recruitment through informal snowball sampling—for example, some participants told us that through word-of-mouth, they recommended the study to their colleagues who would then reach out and schedule an interview. Importantly, interviewers for the project did not encourage informal snowball sampling, nor did they disclose contact information to other participants. The current study was approved by the Research Ethics Board at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Authors, research assistants, and other employees involved in this research signed nondisclosure agreements stating they would keep all information collected during this study confidential and would not communicate this information outside of the research team.
We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews in the summer and fall of 2022. Semi-structured interviews allow participants to guide the conversation, while the researcher is able to follow-up or probe for clarification (Brinkmann, 2020). Thus, during the interviews, participants were encouraged to lead the conversation and share their experiences, while the researcher provided follow-up or clarification. Most interviews lasted between 75 and 120 min either over the phone or in person (the majority of interviews were in person) at a location of the participant's choosing (e.g., at the union's head office). While face-to-face interviews are a more prevalent method of data collection in qualitative research, evidence suggests telephone interviews can also provide rich data and do not inhibit rapport-building necessary to conduct the interview (Mealer & Jones, 2014; Novick, 2008). Notably, we did not find any differences between telephone interviews and in-person interviews. In each case, we built rapport and participants were comfortable discussing the nuances of their interpretations. All interviews were conducted in English, the dominant language in the province under study.
We describe select demographic data for 21 of the 28 participants of the study (demographics were missing or incomplete for 7 participants). We did not follow up extensively for these completed surveys because we did not discern demographics impacted our results and we thought we could better protect anonymity by having fewer identifying data. We collected data on participants’ age, gender, race, educational attainment, and job roles. Of the 21 survey respondents who shared demographic information, 13 (62%) participants self-identified as male while eight (38%) self-identified as female. Most participants (n = 9; 43%) were between the ages of 35 and 54. In terms of race and ethnicity, most participants identified as White (n = 18; 68%), with the highest level of education completed being a college diploma (n = 8; 38%), followed by a university degree (n = 5; 24%). All participants interviewed worked or had recently worked at the prison under study.
Interviews were transcribed verbatim by research assistants for the purposes of data analysis. Members of the research team first coded the interview data using an open-ended coding technique in order to reveal emergent themes. We then individually and sequentially re-coded thematic sections of the data to further explore inter-thematic nuance. Transcript data were analyzed with the assistance of NVivo, a qualitative data analysis software, which facilitated coding data into primary, secondary, and tertiary themes. We employed a semi-grounded constructed approach to data analysis (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Ricciardelli et al., 2010), such that we allowed our thematic findings to emerge from the data without pre-emptively imposing theoretical interpretation. In other words, we did not know what themes would emerge from the data and we framed the study according to what the data revealed theoretically (i.e., moral distress), while still not creating any new theory per se.
This study was guided by a realist lens of inquiry, meaning we approached the data—the narratives and experiences of COs—as constituting a reality or truth irrespective of concerns for generalizability or quantifiability whereby the phenomena under study, at least in part, could be known through words (Bonino et al., 2014). This epistemological orientation was a foundational consideration because it guided the research team to more fully appreciate the perspectives and lived experiences of participants (Liebling et al., 1999), whose accounts of organizational stress in correctional work, though heavily studied, are nonetheless still under-utilized in Canada and other international jurisdictions to inform tangible and meaningful changes to improve staff safety, wellness, and other considerations. Interviews were an appropriate method to use under this epistemological orientation because interviews afforded the research team the opportunity to learn how COs construct knowledge around organizational stress and encounter subsequent moral challenges, while still treating their narratives as “real” and telling lived experiences. While we intended to remain methodologically objective to the best of our ability to ensure a rigorous analysis, we acknowledge that we remain guided by our scholarly and theoretical backgrounds.
Results
We engage the results by presenting the organizational stressors we found to be a source of moral concern for COs employed at HMP. We first unpack three salient organizational stressors overwhelming expressed by COs, which include (1) challenges with management, (2) staff retention, and (3) training. Next, we unpack the context of the space in which COs work and the lack of supports for mental health—a fourth organizational stressor—from participants’ perspectives. Specifically, we speak to how COs interpret and experience moral frustration and distress through the performance of their occupational responsibilities, largely overseen by complicated and problematic institutional structures and forms of governance, and shed light on current challenges. These challenges, we argue, are mostly organizational in nature rather than operational and thus may be remedied with structural and systematic attention to change.
Management
Despite the promise of a new prison, participants recognized a new institution would not resolve the systemic and organizational challenges affecting staff, including those related to “low morale” (P08) or, most pronounced, executive decision-making. Participants were largely morally disgruntled and psychologically harmed by decisions made by senior management, who were often described as inaccessible and absent. Narratives were forthcoming about how actions at a high level of senior administration were interpreted by staff, who generally felt ignored, unappreciated, and unsupported, leading to rich descriptions of moral distress. Generally, multiple reports included descriptions of the superintendent of all prisons “getting lost” at the institution, being misidentified (due to his absence) for an electrician appointment, and, most importantly, his lack of presence in difficult moments that required managerial intervention and support.
Participants also largely felt they were without “the backing of our management team, the department” (P05), placing them in a position of vulnerability and liability when circumstances go awry in prison. This lack of “backing” was also tied to the perspective that persons in management positions need to implement a model for institutional and cultural re-envisioning; here, participants spoke to: [needing] the right people in the right positions, like in the managerial roles. We need people with common sense ‘cause it's not all that common down there. You know, take away the nepotism ‘cause government is full of it and especially our department and even at the [prison] and stuff. (P02)
Staff Retention
Participants felt unsafe in certain spaces because of a “lack of staff” (P02). They noted how “most days we don’t have the staffing availability” (P02). P21 simply explains officers “don’t want to go to work because they don’t feel safe. They don’t feel appreciated.” P15 further explains with a sigh, “Right off the bat, we need more staffing” and P13 adds that “definitely the biggest risk to safety is the lack of staff.” These participants felt undervalued by their employer because they were left to work severely understaffed in terms of CO to incarcerated person ratio, and under such conditions, felt their intrinsic worth was being reduced.
The lack of staffing appears exacerbated by persons retiring early from correctional work, as occupational leaving was commonly discussed by our participants and often attributed to the conditions of work and the mismanagement of the local prison. Here, P01 explains: We need the numbers, we need a good hiring practice and a good retention practice to keep our trained correctional officers—like we’re losing so many correctional officers now with five and 10 years on the job, so these correctional officers are just getting trained and just learning the important skills of the job and we’re losing them. They need to start over with brand new correctional officers that need to be trained and learn the system and learn the politics of correctional life.
P03 continues to note that if government is “really so concerned about inmates getting rehabilitated, they really need to look at our staff levels,” recognizing the role of staff in facilitating rehabilitation programs. Concerns for rehabilitation in contradictory and punitive prison environments have been documented in the extant literature as a source of moral frustration for COs (Ricciardelli et al., 2024). For these reasons, perhaps among others, P13 too attributes many of the staffing shortfalls to “mismanagement,” explaining: Part of it is one hundred percent mismanagement. Just failing to keep on top of retirement and … you’re being forced to work extra overtime, there's a lot of burnout. A lot of burnout in corrections. And here lately, like this year I think is the worst year I see for it. I see a lot of coworkers who just recently resigned. They’re like fifteen, sixteen years into their career. They only got nine years left to draw a pension and they’re getting out. (P13) One thing that is kind of hurtin’ us now is our forced overtime. If something happens and we have forced overtime, because our staffing levels are so low, it's wearing people out. There's no one there to cover off for stuff—everyday I go in now I have a double dinner. The way our days work is 12-h days, is work from 7:30 to 7:30. You get two-hour lunch. So, from 12:00 to 1:00 and from 1:00 to 2:00. Technically, if you don’t have a double dinner, you work one of those lunches and you’re off the other one. So you have one hour to go do what you want or whatever the case may be. But because of our staffing levels are being so low—jobs—there's so much stuff on the go in the prison, between contractors, and programs, and stuff happening during lunch, that they’re making double dinners and it's wearing people out ‘cause you’re not getting that break. You’re not getting that hour to go unwind. Staffing levels at [prison] is a major issue right now. I’d say it's one of the biggest issues. And especially now they’re talking about bringing in this new prison, and I think, they’re talking about the increased staffing as to what, 25 percent? I mean, we gotta start building now. (Emphasis added)
P15 not only describes current challenges at their institution with staffing, but also emphasizes that building the adequate workforce must start immediately rather than wait to begin with the new prison. This is viewed as essential to meet incarcerated people and staff needs, as well as to ensure a safer environment. COs readily highlighted the role of staff in incarcerated people's rehabilitation; they were highly sympathetic to the effects on the lived realities of incarcerated people when they are short-staffed. P04 describes the repercussions of understaffing for incarcerated people, explaining that “if something happens with them or they’re sick or they get called away or they’re short staffed. Then the programs get cancelled. And that's unfortunate for the men in [prison]….” Emphasized here is moral concern for the well-being of the incarcerated population weighed against a recognition of the mental and human limits of strained staff.
P08 also speaks to repercussions for incarcerated people due to being short-staffed, describing how “we don’t have rec, like I said earlier, or staff to offer the inmates rec, which they’re supposed to get. Or sometimes visits are cancelled because of staffing.” They continue to explain the need for staff, because “when you have staff and things can run, they can go outside rec. They can go to the gym. Ah, they can get out of their cells. Read books and movies and stuff. Staffing is just a big thing.” P21's words readily highlight the relationship between staffing and incarcerated people's living experience, which mutually affect staff well-being and health, especially when COs begin to feel guilty and sorry for incarcerated people experiencing deprivations on account of staff retention issues.
The challenges of staffing are exacerbated also by people being on leave—a complex situation given, without the staff to fill vacancies, officers on leave feel guilty for leaving their colleagues short-staffed but nonetheless require the leave for their wellness. P13 elaborates: A lot of mental health issues developed in the field and we have a lot of people who were off on extended periods of sick leave or extended periods of workers compensation or long-term disability. They’re leaving vacancies and it's just the vacancies are never being filled. They’re just leaving it to us to do more with less.
Discussions of workers’ compensation suggested the “compensation” was far from adequate. For instance, P06 notes “you are supposed to report that as a workforce injury but the reality is nobody wants to report it ‘cause nobody wants to go on workers comp cause they can’t afford it. They can’t afford it so what do they do they bottle it up inside.” They continued, “we need a sick leave policy that reflects it ‘cause in the eyes of government we’re just abusers, right, we’re just abusing our time … you’re coming to work every day with no staff and everything, what happens [is] your mental health is deteriorating.” In addition to experiencing mental health challenges, P06 believes their personal ethics are being called into question by management when they request time off to receive treatment for mental health injury, leaving them to feel frustrated and insecure when choosing, again, between their health and the (sadly) competing needs of the organization.
Speaking further to needed time off, P21 feels staff need sick time when ill, but instead explains that “the sick time here is shit.” They go on to state, “I shouldn’t have to wait five years to use my vacation time” due to being short-staffed at the institution, nor should they have to “beg [for] the annual leave spots” given there are so few—and as a result, people are “trading annual leave spots.” Beyond leave, P18 feels that “breaks go a long way. Sometimes when you’re short staffed there's not an opportunity for a proper break.” They further confirm “also access to annual leave, can go a long way. That's an issue currently.” Ultimately, COs depict an organization in a struggle between addressing staff retention and staff health, even though officers recognize they do not need to be mutually exclusive categories, if properly managed. Doing so would also lessen the chances of feeling in a situation where COs are compromised morally, as resource shortages are framed as an unacceptable justification for the issues currently and historically plaguing their institution of employment.
Training
P05 explained that “training is a huge, huge start to feeling safe.” This sentiment was echoed widely among participants. Despite the anticipated physical and technological improvements of the new prison, without sufficient and adequate training, many COs pointed out how the challenges in the current prison will remain. P15 asserts how their prison does not simply need more staff, but also “adequate staff”: There—as of right now, from my understanding—and the only place they’re hiring from is the APA program, which is the Atlantic Policing Academy in P.E.I. On this [province] we have nowhere to do that. Like we don’t have a security course offered anywhere here on the [province]. So, me coming from the last internal program that we ran, I feel that it's a better suit when you run the internal program than picking from APA. (P15)
Participants suggest officers require more training not only to learn how to supervise incarcerated people with diverse needs, but also to improve their mental health literacy in relation to the self. P11 explains how working with incarcerated people can be “mentally too hard, too draining. You know the inmates that are coming in now—the vast majority is a lot of mental health people with very rapidly deteriorating mental health because they’re not getting the proper help they need in there.” P11 raises a moral challenge having to witness incarcerated people not have their basic needs met in a prison environment that is already strained and quite often exacerbates vulnerability. This deficit in care weighs on the officer, who calls for more training and programs to help officers cope with the harsh realities of carrying out prison work in underfunded institutions that do not always live up to their rehabilitative and healthcare mandates.
Other participants echoed how training needs to be improved, refined, localized, more expansive, as they are integral to the functioning of any prison. P12, for instance, states “training is a big one…. Training is key to a lot of stuff like that. It gives you the confidence to be able to go in and do your job.” P14 feels “it's important that staff be trained properly.” They provide an example: “as simple as use of force training. I didn’t get use of force training for like five or six years. But yet we were being scrutinized for our use of force and I said, ‘if our employer won’t provide use of force training then how could they turn around and criticize me because I did something wrong when I haven’t been trained in six years?’” Here, P14 feels scrutiny of COs are unjust if they do not have the training necessary to fulfill their responsibilities of public safety, hence they transfer blame unto their employer and raise questions of ethics concerning how criticizing individuals gets priority over addressing the gaping structural holes in the organization.
Some participants further emphasized the danger associated with inadequate levels of (especially trained and competent) staff: “more staff, proper PPE, you need proper training, you need competent staff, you need just not to hire someone ‘cause they’re a body, you need to be properly vetted, properly background checked” (P06). Their words caution that “bodies are not enough” so to speak, but that carefully implemented human resources solutions need to support thorough and ongoing skill training and development as well as thorough background checks so officers can function more effectively as a team and ensure there is a process in place to confirm those selected are a right fit for the job and correctional environment. There is some sense of moral frustration at the notion “anyone” can be recruited into correctional work, especially when staff shortages exist, despite the occupation requiring highly refined skillsets and communication practices, and a great deal of personal and ethical integrity.
Impacts on Mental Health
Participants were clear about the impacts of organizational stressors on their wellness. First, the organizational stressors, not operational, were expressed as more often challenging their abilities to meet the needs of incarcerated people, which resulted in incarcerated people being in states of compromised wellness and accompanying mental health concerns, as well as other trying and distressful realities such as anxiety, frustration, anger, and so on. COs began most interviews speaking at length about the needs—often simple needs—of incarcerated people, such as more access to fresh air—which is a direct outcome of being short staffed as well as other organizational challenges. For example, P09 stated: If they’re looked after and they’re happy, you’re gonna have less safety concerns. If they’re not getting their rec, if they’re not getting their visits, like they aren’t right now, then they’re gonna be upset, and then that staff safety becomes a concern—more of a concern because they’re looking at somebody to lash out at. And if it's not another inmate, it's gonna be a staff member.
To illuminate the impact on COs, P02 first reiterates that many “prisoners [have] complex needs,” and then continues by recognizing “we got staff who are alcoholics, have drug addictions, gambling addictions, financial problems. I mean throw in on top of a toxic work environment having to deal with what you have to deal with in the daytime but then your own personal life. It's not a healthy recipe.” Their words clarify how organizational stress, characterized by a “toxic work environment” and laced with many moral challenges, impedes health and wellness for COs. To further complicate the mental health of staff, P02 continued to discuss the “profound” impact of watching their colleagues be charged criminally for an incident on duty, explaining: “I would have been one of those ten and it's profoundly affected us all down there. I don’t know if we can ever recover from that the level of trust from the department and what they tried to do and the RNC. I mean it's horrendous and we never had a voice.” Thus, the organizational stressors come from many directions, including management, understaffing, and training, and the outcomes for wellness appeared prevalent and strained by ethical compromise; however, what also arose—the central theme here—was another organizational stress—the lack of support for officer mental health, including when they are being investigated.
As per the words of P03, “There's just not enough support in my opinion. We’ll say, oh the inmates get more support than we do and that stuff. Like, they get to talk to a psychologist they want.” The officer's words, P03, speak to both a lack of support and moral distress due to being treated in ways that left officers feeling inferior in value as a person in comparison to incarcerated people, who as other officers described, also do not have their mental health needs fully met. P03 continues to express the challenge in asking: If we have a major incident, we have a psychologist on site. Like, why not? Why can’t we talk to them too? If inmates can talk to them, why can’t we? The briefing is one thing. And they always say, oh you have your EAP [Employee Assistance Program] and this and that.
What is clear from these passages is staff recognize how foundational staff and incarcerated people's mental health is to building a rehabilitative and supportive prison space, and that by privileging the needs of one group over another, a cultural mentality is built that drives staff to believe they are forgotten—even though, like incarcerated people, they must continue to work and co-exist in difficult carceral spaces. The moral harm also arose in this perception of being underrecognized, as P23 articulates, “all this stuff happened to me, it's like the correctional officers I mean and it just builds up and builds up and builds up and there's really no recognition, there's nobody [who] asks you even if you’re okay.” This officer describes feeling alienated in their harm. Moreover, there is likely a relationship between moral harms and mental health that would be negatively impacted by feeling undervalued and embedded in inequitable practices within their work environment.
Some participants spoke of how their work “changed them.” For instance, P03 describes a change in self saying “because I’ve already seen changes inside me, and my family have. Of just how, I’m not trusting of people as easy.” They attribute their change in self, at least in part, to “exhaustion,” but not from “just with dealing with them [residents]. Exhaustion in general where sometimes it's just too much and you’re like, ‘yeah alright b’y, I’ll do that’.” P06 also states that “PTSD and stress” are very real. They continue to explain: “working in this years ago used to wear you out but being in there all day, just hearing the chatter all day and asking and just manipulating you all day long is exhausting and leading to burnout too.” Many officers felt their sense of self change from being extroverted to introverted and this change has affected their life outside of work—a potential consequence of continuous moral harm, distress, or injury. For instance, one participant relocated personally to a more rural area where “I don’t have to see my neighbours, don’t want to see my neighbours, don’t want to talk to nobody. Over the years I used to call it hidden stress like you don’t know until it breaks you.” This passage describes the toll of prison work on staff, and how that stress, especially when unresolved, can spill over into their personal lives and change how they perceive others because of the harm that shapes their interpretations of the world within and outside of prison spaces.
An additional challenge is how the available mental health supports for staff are perceived as inadequate or even unavailable in ways desirable. Speaking to available formal support, P11 explains “I feel like our policies when it comes to EAP and any access for us to get counselling is—like I’ve had to avail to it a few times. It was never great, it was never overly helpful.” Moreover, the removal or underfunding of mental health supports/programs for staff appear to have driven down morale and caused some staff to feel they have little recourse when they experience mental health challenges, again rendering them in a dichotomous position of choosing between health and work.
To provide an example, participants lamented that despite the exposure to potentially psychologically traumatic events, there was a lack of mental health services for employees, services they felt were necessary given the inevitable occupational strains they encounter. Simpler processes, such as Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) or debriefing in the moments following an incident were described as not having enough presence in their workplace. Here, P17 describes how they only received debriefing training in 2014, noting that “we don’t use that a lot, no one has approached me on that.”
Others, like P01, reminisced about years prior when they “had a really good wellness program for a few years and that has come to a full [stop] so we need our mental health supports and people there to recognize when people need those supports. Some support should be mandatory. People—a lot of people don’t realize they’re hurting so.” P01, like many others, recognizes that mental health is on a continuum and thus evolving such that compromised wellness is not always immediately recognized. They put forth a history of “wellness programs” that had ceased, regretfully. P06 also spoke of the historical wellness programs that had ended, saying: “We used to have a wellness officer person […]. She was great. Stop in anytime have a chat, tell her what was going on. She would talk to you, help you with anything. I mean a lot of staff really enjoyed her; we lost her. They took the funding away from it. Like we need like wellness officers, an onsite psychologist just for us.” Although recent efforts have been made toward improving mental health supports, for example, CISM training occurred in 2023 and a peer support program has launched, officers at the time of interview felt they had no recourse for support—including the ability to take guilt-free leave—for supporting their mental health despite work in strained, understaffed environments of saddening infrastructure.
Discussion
In the current study, we analyzed responses for 28 COs employed at prison in Atlantic Canada focusing on emergent themes around organizational stress and its relationship to moral distress and harm, specifically management challenges and those tied to staff retention and recruitment, as well as training and mental health support. We presented these stressors within the context of working at a prison institution in disrepair, evidencing their impacts on CO wellness and shortfalls in addressing CO mental health needs. Evidenced here is how steps toward supporting CO mental health appear to have decreased in recent years, despite previous progress (i.e., Johnston et al., 2022), shedding light on a concerning situation for incarcerated people and officer mental health.
Regarding management, participants collectively spoke to the challenges with upper management, feeling (a) government officials did not prioritize correctional services in the province under study; (b) upper management were sometimes inadequate, absent, or indifferent to staff needs; and (c) frontline staff were removed from any discussions about policy or practical changes they are obligated to implement. The result was low morale, feelings their safety was of no concern, and that incarcerated people's wellness was also disregarded. Participants felt without voice and thus unable to prompt change, leaving them in moral predicaments where they do not feel backed by management when unfortunate happenings transpire in prison as a consequence of poor infrastructure and human resources, nor able to respond to incarcerated people's diverse needs. They recommended leadership training for management and government officials, including correctional-specific knowledge translation to ensure policy decisions reflected the context and working conditions of their prison and were feasible to implement within the current infrastructure.
With regard to what was desired in a superintendent of all prisons, participants discussed their desire for someone who had worked the front lines, preferably as a CO who later left the position, worked in management in an alternative environment to acquire leadership skills and perspective, and then returned to the role of superintendent informed by both forms of applied experience. We put forth these criteria for considerations when filling such positions of high leadership in correctional services more broadly—as the perspective incorporates and responds to the idea of hiring from within as advantageous but also incorporates the advantages of hiring from without—creating an equilibrium of perspectives and obtaining benefits from each view. Such a potential “cosmos” of positionalities, we argue, would also help COs feel more valued in their employment, as perceived undervaluing and placement in moral dilemmas have led some COs to question their employer's ethical framework.
Understaffing was viewed as posing a risk to the safety, security, and, thus, wellness of COs (as well as people incarcerated and other correctional staff). One reason expressed to explain understaffing is the number of COs retiring early—years prior to the eligibility for a full pension—which was attributed to mismanagement of the prison. The realities of COs leaving the occupation or retiring early were ethnographically noticed during interviews—participants discussed how many of their coworkers were leaving the profession after only a decade of work in the institution and explained that the situation at their prison had intensified negatively in recent years due to changes in management and government. The risk to self and colleagues was a paramount concern but was also accompanied by concerns for incarcerated people who cannot engage in programs or visits (when existent) without adequate staffing. The reality becomes, due to the symbiotic relationship between incarcerated people and COs, that a lack of staffing impacts incarcerated people's wellness and temperaments, and vice versa. The result is a negative environment, laced with low morale, and riddled with potential conflict.
Staffing is further compromised because of COs on leave (who feel guilt that they are letting down their colleagues and jeopardizing their safety by taking needed leave, or guilt when harm occurs on their watch due to understaffing), which results in inaccessible leave due to vacancies or declined leave because of self-stigma. Those who desired to take leave, even annual leave, still felt that it was a fight to acquire. The consequence, as expressed by participants, was fatigue and burnout, where many felt their wellness was compromised but saw no way forward to rectify the situation given the inaccessibility of leave and the overtime shaping the workspace. Simply put, COs in the current study believe they have to choose between their health and the health of organization, and regardless which decision they make, they encounter moral distress because, in their view, someone is going to be harmed whether it is due to inadequate staffing levels or overworked COs.
Thus, we put forth the recommendation that the province should invest in more full-time permanent positions for officers, not only at the institution under study but across provincial and territorial systems. Ethnographically, we learned many COs are only parttime or casually employed, despite being there for at least a decade. They may work fulltime hours, but they lack job security and benefit eligibility, which exacerbates burnout and fatigue. They also, in such positions, appear not to qualify for annual leave. Thus, these positions should be converted to full-time permanent positions that provide opportunities for COs to seek some semblance of work–life balance and reprieve from the realities of their occupational work and responsibilities. The literature clearly supports the need for work–life balance and unstigmatized time off as necessary for wellness across professions (Albertsen et al., 2008; Johnston et al., 2022), including those less intensive or potentially life-threatening, which is the reality of CO work.
A third organizational stress that emerged in our data was inadequate CO training. Training is essential for staff and incarcerated people's safety (Ricciardelli, 2022a), however, a reduction in training opportunities was noted. Dialogue with officers suggests training is currently below minimal in their workplace in terms of “internal programs” that train officers specifically for this facility and in current best-practices. Officers largely lamented the pressure they experience to provide mental health supports and respond to mental health crises among incarcerated people but being only security trained. The disconnect between the needs of incarcerated people for mental health responses and intervention is vast from the security-oriented focus in the training COs receive. They are not clinical practitioners but feel they are expected to engage in such behaviors—well beyond their expertise—and feel the responsibility and liability is overwhelming, and in some cases, creating moral distress. Accordingly, there is a need for the province under study to mandate specific CO training and CO training beyond a general college certification. We are not suggesting the latter be replaced, but instead that the training continue in a training program model that prepares COs for the mandates and teaches expected behaviors as per provincial policies (e.g., use of force, response models, posts, de-escalation techniques, processes for fulfilling incarcerated people's needs).
Research indicates the consequences of these types of organizational stressors, among other operational stressors, include compromised wellness (Duxbury et al., 2015; McCreary et al., 2017; Ricciardelli, 2018; Ricciardelli & Johnston, 2022). However, despite the compromised wellness of staff, and the recognition of how staff wellness and incarcerated people's wellness are symbiotic, a fourth organizational stressors emerges within this context—the lack of mental health supports that meet CO needs available at the time of interview. Officers spoke of challenges with the formal mental health supports available (i.e., EAP) and a lack of informal supports (i.e., requesting CISM training, people asking how they are, a mental health person). They lamented the termination of the mental health position to support staff, having previously valued her presence. Additionally, given staff shortages, even taking leave in response to their mental health as a remedy or strategy for healing was riddled with guilt.
Organizational stress is clearly tied to, even found to be in a causal relationship with, CO mental health (Ghaddar et al., 2008; Ricciardelli & Power, 2020). Moreover, in the current study, the relationship between the two appears to fail to support each other, which only intensifies challenges. Organizational stress, such as staff shortages, appear connected to officer fatigue, exhaustion, and mental wellness, yet taking leave for mental health only exacerbates the problem for the remaining officers, which then further creates guilt and hesitancy to take leave; the relationship is reciprocal and stressful.
The reality remains, however, that organizational stressors are arguably rooted in policies, structures, and practices—they are predictable and able to be changed. First and foremost, there is a need for more staff, which requires an investment in correctional services and systems. Human resources are essential if the needs of incarcerated people and COs (as well as other staff) are to be met, including those of management, who also feel these strains. Thus, we recommend governments adequately staff their prisons and correctional systems more broadly if the desire is to truly invest in both a healthy labor force and rehabilitation and wellness of incarcerated people (as well as probationers and parolees). Additional changes must be rooted in localized policies, ensuring management is present on-site and available to staff, providing leadership training, tightening hiring practices to value experience in correctional services as well as leadership/management for those in such positions, and having localized training for new officers as well as onboarding and follow-up training.
Conclusion
Our findings suggest that organizational stress has a significant impact on COs and is shaped by encounters with moral challenge, frustration, distress, and harm. Based on interviews with COs employed at a provincial correctional institution in Atlantic Canada, we explored four prevalent sources of organizational stress that COs primarily discussed: management, staff retention, training needs, and a lack of mental health support. These sources of organizational stress are impacted by COs’ conditions of employment. We further examined how these main sources of organizational stress directly affect CO well-being and mental health, especially when negotiating moral vulnerabilities and dilemmas encountered through challenging organizational structures, deficits, and gaps. Finally, because organizational stressors often stem from barriers at the policy level, we put forth several recommendations and highlighted several practical changes that can be made to ease the strains felt by COs and better support their overall mental health and well-being, such as increasing staffing levels, providing more training opportunities, and providing more adequate mental health support for staff.
Our study, like much qualitative research, is a localized study. Notwithstanding that many of our findings are consistently found in other institutions, we do put forth caution with regard to generalizability. As more of a case study, the depth of our study into the institution under study may not be reflective of prisons in other Canadian or international jurisdictions. Our sample, although we exhausted emergent themes, is only moderate in size, which is a second limitation. In addition, there could be limitations in our sampling due to the method used for recruitment, specifically, the participants’ union sent out the recruitment email, thus individuals who may be offput by their union may be less likely to have responded to the request for participants. Moreover, our initial focus was to study prison design for a new facility and its associated officer needs—the organizational stress and moral harm focus was emergent in data and not the initial research question we set out to explore. Thus, we do recommend future research consider more in depth the nuances around CO experiences of organizational stress and moral harm and distress, as well as ways to remedy these stresses.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
