The Interaction of Personal and Occupational Factors in the Suicide Deaths of Correction Officers

Abstract

In the aftermath of a cluster of at least twenty suicides among correction officers working for a state department of correction, we conducted the first extensive mixed-methods study of correction officer suicide. Using a grounded theory approach, we sought to better understand the ways in which personal and occupational factors may have contributed to the suicide deaths of the officers. We conducted comprehensive case studies that involved reviewing each officer’s personnel file in its entirety, extracting administrative data to capture work experiences and violence exposures, and conducting interviews with family members and friends of the officers to better understand the personal and professional lives of those officers who had died by suicide. Through inductive analyses of the data collected, we found that the interaction of personal and occupational risk factors with aspects of the occupational work culture best explained suicide among the observed cases.

Keywords:

• Prisons
• corrections
• suicide
• suicide risk
• correction officers

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, we express our sincere gratitude to all of the officers, friends and family members who participated in this research. We also thank Rhiana Kohl, who has been a partner in this research from its inception, our colleagues at Riverside Trauma Center, and our grant managers and science advisors at the National Institute of Justice, in particular Marie Garcia, Eric Martin, and Angela Moore. We would also like to thank the lead resarch assistants Jessica Trapassi and Stacie St. Louis, as well as all of the research assistants who worked on this project over the past four years: Steven Heinz, Candence Wills, Beck Strah, Brad Luckett, Amy Gartland, Maddison Stemple-Pilot, Margaret Abercrombie, Rahma Mohamed, Christina DeSantis, Ciara Tenney, Emily Nayer, Bryan Bonnett, Miatta Harris, Caitlin Kloess, Haley Pereira, Kexin Cui, and Taryn Koury. Finally we thank the anonymous reviewers of earlier drafts for their comments that helped strengthen the article. Any shortcomings that remain are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There were additional officer suicides across county correction agencies over the same period.

2 Calculated by the authors as a three-year moving average for the period between 2010 and 2015. Note that the calculated rate at the department includes officers who had retired prior to their death (all but one had died just one to two years after retiring).

3 The research protocols for this study were approved by the Northeastern University Institutional Review Board (IRB #17-02-02).

4 These reports only go back to 2002 when the department’s inmate management system (IMS) was established. Some of the officers had careers that extended back many years before 2002, but only incidents since 2002 can be retrieved. For most officers, this analysis includes all incidents that occurred for at least 8 years prior to the suicide.

5 Two additional families corresponded with us in writing about the suicide death of their loved one but did not participate in a formal in-person interview. These family members are not included among the 42 interview participants.

6 All names used in this manuscript, including those of officers, family members, friends, and facilities are pseudonyms created by the research team to protect confidentiality.

7 Liebling (2005) has argued that “… there is a collective working personality or officer culture detectable among prison officers in general. This ‘working personality’ is related to the nature of the occupation and is composed of both positive and negative characteristics” (p.107). She adds that, although there is a collective working personality, the officer culture can vary significantly across institutions and is “linked to indirectly expressed organizational goals” (Liebling, 2005, p. 110). While there are certainly substantial variations in the working cultures of each of the prisons across the state, two-thirds of those we interviewed for these case studies were friends and relatives with little direct knowledge of the working cultures within the individual institutions. Other parts of our ongoing study of officer suicide involve interviews and focus groups with administrators and separately with officers at all ranks and across all of the facilities across the department. We anticipate we will be able to use these data to understand some of the institution specific effects of what Liebling (2005) has described as the “complex and variegated” working cultures across facilities (p. 120).

8 Given the small number of officers who died at higher ranks, to preserve confidentiality when we discuss our findings, we refer to all of the officers as ‘officers’ without reference to rank.

9 Because most of what we learned about the suicide deaths of these officers was learned from the interviews, we know far less about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the officers for whom we had little to no contact from family or friends.

10 Across most of the cases, only limited evidence of chronic pain and violence exposure can be deduced from the official administrative and personnel records.

11 Two of the officer suicides in our 2010–2015 timeframe also involved attempted homicide or homicide of a current or former spouse or domestic partner making this the third homicide-suicide for this department in a decade.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by Award No. 2016-MU-MU-0010, awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice.

Notes on contributors

Natasha A. Frost

Natasha A. Frost is professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Frost’s research focuses on the causes and consequences of mass incarceration. She is co-author, with Todd Clear, of The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration (NYU Press, 2013). For the past five years, Dr. Frost has been working collaboratively with the Massachusetts Department of Correction on research related to officer wellbeing. In 2015 and 2016, Dr. Frost led data collection in Massachusetts for a two-state study of correctional officer stress and in 2016, she was awarded funding from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) for a mixed-methods study designed to further our understanding of the impacts of correctional officer suicide and to identify risk factors for suicide and suicidal ideation among correction officers.

Carlos E. Monteiro

Carlos Monteiro is an assistant professor in the Sociology Department at Suffolk University. Dr. Monteiro’s research focuses largely on corrections and punishment with a specific focus on recidivism and reentry. Most recently his work examines correctional environments including the demands of correctional contexts on staff. He is a co-principal investigator on a National Institute of Justice funded study on correctional officer wellbeing, with specific emphasis on officer suicide. In 2015, Dr. Monteiro earned his Ph.D. in criminology and justice policy from Northeastern University.