Guest comment: Working in a prison can take its toll

I spent 30 years working in a prison as a doctor and had the unique opportunity of observing those it took a toll on and left, while others, for a variety of reasons, stayed and made the best of it. I admit that I never thought that I would end up working in prison, but when I finished my residency in internal medicine, the National Health Service Corps placed me in Northern Nevada Correctional Center to do a four-year payback. In my second year on the job, I was taken hostage, assaulted, raped and rescued when a SWAT team, 10 hours later, threw in a grenade and killed the inmate a few feet from me. It happened on Friday the 13th, and I went back to work on Monday. I was still in shock, but what I experienced exemplifies what can happen to people who work in prison.

Whether it’s verbal, emotional, sexual or physical violence to themselves, or watching what happens to the incarcerated, it affects each person differently. 

When I returned to work, no one talked to me. At the time, I was too raw to initiate any conversation, but after a few days on the job, I started to feel that the people who ran the prison didn’t care. Maybe they were afraid of repercussions, or maybe they just didn’t know how to help someone who was traumatized on the job.

I’ve been asked a number of times why I stayed in the prison and turned it into a calling that lasted 30 years. There were a number of reasons. I had to do two more years in prison to fulfill my National Health Service Corps commitment; I was fortunate enough to have a German mother who trained me to be tough and resilient; I wanted to help the underdog and underserved. Plus, the inmates helped me heal. They sent me get-well cards and made it very clear that they as a group did not condone what one of them had done. They let me know how valuable I was to them because I cared about their well-being. That made me realize how the individuals in power didn’t know how to deal with what happened to me, and if they didn’t know that or care, what did that say about how they treated staff or the inmates in their custody.

There is a lot of research done on the impact on the mental health of custody officers. I have watched officers who were professional and officers who were not. According to the Prison Policy Initiative (a nonprofit prison advocacy thinktank), “the work environment for custody officers in prisons is significantly affected by high levels of stress, burnout, and staff turnover due to factors like overcrowding, violence, unpredictable shifts, inadequate support, and exposure to trauma, ultimately leading to negative impacts on their physical and mental health: this is often compounded by understaffing, creating a vicious cycle where the workload becomes even more demanding for remaining officers.”     

I have seen the impact of the prison system on the custody officers over the years. In Nevada, to become a correctional officer, one has to have a high school diploma or GED and two years of work in any field and be 21 years old when hired. They have a minimum of 160 hours of pre-service training and then get a POST (Peace Officer Standards and Training) certification. Many young officers take the lead from senior officers, and if those senior officers are burnt out and stressed, they don’t have the time and energy to help someone new on the job who experiences trauma.

So, what happens to people who work in prisons for years? Some are just counting every day so they can retire and get a pension. Some cope with alcohol and drugs. Some get physical and mental health issues related to their work, and some commit suicide. Others enjoy being professional and part of programs that benefit the inmate population and reduce violence: Pups on Parole, the Mustang Program, educational programs, the hospice program, etc.

When I left, I wrote my memoir, 30 Years Behind Bars, Trials of a Prison Doctor. (See “Walled in—After a long career of tough decisions, a prison doctor tells her story,” RN&R, June 13, 2018.) It is available on Amazon to give a different perspective than that of a captive or captor. Now, I’m going back into the prison to teach Psychology 101 in the college program for the incarcerated.

Dr. Karen Gedney is a retired prison doctor and an advocate and consultant on holistic prison reform. She is a member of Nevada Prison Education Project, Return Strong, The Nevada State Prison Preservation Society, and Ridge House in Reno.