An uptick in violence at Mule Creek Prison leaves our correspondent wondering about the place of officer mental health in California’s prison reform efforts.

As someone who has been down for more than 30 years I have long been aware of an all-pervading “us vs. them” dynamic between captives and captors. So when I found myself experiencing a stroke in the middle of the night this past December, it was an odd circumstance to be relying on a sea of green colored uniforms to come to my rescue. 

Following the “man down!” call from behind the locked cell door, it was only a matter of minutes before I was surrounded by custody and medical staff. I found myself hoisted up in one grab by a particularly large correctional officer, plopped onto a gurney and rushed out to a waiting medical cart. I spent three days and nights in the hospital, where they told me that the rapid action of prison staff likely prevented debilitating permanent harm, or worse.

When I got back, my head was still spinning and the numbness on my right side wasn’t gone, but my certainty in a faulty “us vs. them” belief system had crumbled. In fact, I find myself viewing the recent eruption in violence and chaos on California state prison Level IV yards, which house the highest security prisoners, with some alarm. 

Assaults on staff are up. At Mule Creek State Prison, for instance, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) incident reports for the years 2023-2024, assaults on staff have climbed nearly twofold in the two-year period from 22 in 2023, to 42 in 2024. It should be noted that what constitutes an assault is vague and broad. For example, if an officer trips while trying to stop a fight he might feel inclined to classify the injury as an assault. 

Prisons are violent, stressful places to work or live.

The reasons for the increase in violence are likely multi-fold and vary according to with whom you are talking. Testimonial evidence from 25 correctional officers in different roles at Mule Creek placed blame in good part on the department’s attempts at implementation of the new “California Model,” a more humane carceral prototype currently underway in the CDCR. Some officers shared that incarcerated individuals aren’t complying with orders, display outright contempt and disrespect toward correctional staff, and appear to have a sense of entitlement, as if they think nothing’s going to happen to them.

Incarcerated individuals I spoke to counter that many officers are entrenched in the old-school prison mentality where force and intimidation are a first response. They posit that many correctional staff are resistant to a more humane prison model where prisoners are treated as human beings and cling to a more draconian penological process. Some I spoke with believe that the chaotic turmoil, social uncertainty and blatant disregard for law and order arising from Trump’s return to the White House has created an atmosphere that reestablishes a more adversarial relationship between guards and gangs. Each resort to familiar operational paradigms — the gangs asserting power through drugs, money, and force, with guards responding with force and intimidation. 

Whatever the causes of recent circumstances and conditions, there is a central certainty that remains constant — prisons are violent, stressful places to work or live. 

This is not an unexpected or extraordinary observation. What is extraordinary is that the life expectancy of a correctional officer is 59 years of age, while the rest of the US population averages around 77 years. According to the Archives of Suicide Research, correctional officer suicide rates are 39% higher than those of other occupations, with depression, alcoholism, domestic violence and heart attacks reported at much higher frequency than other law enforcement careers.

A 2017 study conducted by Amy Lerman and her team at the University of California, Berkeley, provides more detail. Their survey of 8,334 participants found that 80% of correctional officers have responded to violence in the past six months and 10% report serious injury in responding to incidents. Sixty-three percent report handling or seeing dead bodies on the job, and over 70% have witnessed someone seriously injured or killed. About a third are dissatisfied with access to or quality of safety equipment, and 70% report a lack of adequate staffing in order to provide safety and security. Suicide ideation is disturbingly high, PTSD symptoms and anxiety are common.

When dealing with stress that accompanies correctional work, much of the time officers adopt an attitude of toughness or apparent invulnerability. This coping mechanism may get them through their shift, but denial and exposure to long-term stress is detrimental.

Margo Charkow-Ross is a licensed clinical social worker, behavioral health and wellness consultant for the CDCR Office of Employee Wellness, and a peer support mental health liaison. She said that a confluence of stress factors and ineffective coping mechanisms can lead to a condition known as hypervigilance, which can be overwhelming and result in bad outcomes. 

Under hypervigilance, “Your brain becomes extra aware of your surroundings, your senses are heightened, distinguishing when there’s danger around you,” Charkow-Ross explained. “Adrenaline and cortisol levels are high, you’re hyper-focused and on edge. Correctional officers may be hypervigilant their whole shift, it’s not easy coming down from that.”

It’s different for each person but there are commonalities among the hypervigilant: the inability to focus on what’s in front of you, difficulty sleeping or unwinding after a shift. Denial coping results in numerous negative consequences. Extreme stress and violence exposure can further result in depression, substance abuse, relationship problems, sleep disruption, and suicide ideation. 

Officer wellness is not separable from concerns about the safe and effective management of correctional institutions. It is at the heart of these concerns.

Seeking solutions isn’t easy. In the correctional environment, there’s an expectation that competent officers are supposed to know it all and do it on their own. There’s a fear of being judged and asking for help could be perceived as a sign of weakness. Growing up, many of us learned that we should work through the problem, rub some dirt on it and get back in the game. We mimic the way our parents do things. There are egos involved. People may wait until it becomes too much and maybe it’s too late.

While the primary responsibility of correctional officers is to maintain the safety and security of the prison, their close proximity to and constant presence among the incarcerated population has the potential to impact incarcerated individuals’ rehabilitative process, while possibly and inadvertently impacting their self-welfare as well. Unfortunately, their training lacks focus on the rehabilitative aspect. In fact, according to study published by Corrections, a peer-reviewed journal on correctional policy and practice, the average time devoted to the topic is less than four hours. 

Based on Lerman’s findings, getting to the core issues of correctional officer stress is an important starting point for any serious discussions on revamping California’s, or any state’s penal system. 

“Without a healthy workforce, ensuring the rehabilitation and care of people in prison is simply not going to be possible,” Lerman writes. “Officer wellness is not separable from concerns about the safe and effective management of correctional institutions. It is at the heart of these concerns.”

Innovative prison reform programs such as those currently being attempted with the new “California Model” working to change the cultural dynamics of inmate-staff relations. One of those is Amend, a University of California San Francisco-based program attempting to infuse a public health approach to reduce violence in the prison culture 

For the past few years, Amend has been organizing excursions to Norway’s much less violent prisons, which have included members of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, representatives from victims’ rights groups, former prisoners and others. The Amend approach recognizes that both prisoners and correctional officers can share chronic health issues, which have origins in unhealthy physical and psychological relationships and environments. A fundamental intent of Amend is to advance communications and relations between the incarcerated and custody.

CDCR Secretary Jeffery Macomber, among the group that visited Norway prisons in 2021, told us at Mule Creek in a late 2024 interview that the new California model is designed to not only enhance prisoner programming, but to create a less stressful environment for custody and prison staff.

How exactly this is supposed to happen, and through what concrete steps, only time will reveal. At Mule Creek, concerned incarcerated individuals, in concert with the Inmate Advisory Council, have formed a committee to determine concerns and request for a roundtable with members of the prison community, administration and the CDCR. In the prison environment, trying to foretell the future is like looking into the darkness at the far end of a long, shadowy jailhouse tier … you never know what’s to come.

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D. Razor Babb writes from Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California. Babb founded the Mule Creek Post in 2018 and now serves as a features writer on the incarcerated-run newspaper.