Correctional Officer Training: Opportunities and Challenges of the AMstregnth Program in Canada

ABSTRACT

Despite a voluminous literature recognizing the challenges and stresses facing correctional officers, few programs exist to preventatively help correctional officers with their mental health, and of the existing programs few are designed specifically for correctional officers or have any evidence-based data available that speaks to their effectiveness. In the current study, we start to fill this gap in knowledge by providing feedback on a pre-employment mental health training program designed for correctional officers, Advanced Mental Strength and Conditioning (AMStrength) offered to recruits in the Correctional Service of Canada. We draw on interviews with 49 recruits to understand their experience of the program, the skills learned, and their application of the skills learned to shed light on the programming needs of recruits as they prepare for correctional work. Findings show general themes: that recruits are (i) largely positive about the AMStrength training and the skills taught, but also (ii) resistant to personalizing the training evidenced in a description of the training as useful for others but not themselves. Policy and training implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Correctional officers
• prison
• mental health
• AMStrength
• coping

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The Correctional Training Program is a training program that all CSC Correctional Officers are required to complete. The 49 participants are not all from the same cohort. Each cohort is between 20 and 32 participants.

² The primary investigator was unaffiliated with the program but did complete the training as a recruit/researcher in a ethnographic study (not to obtain a position as a correctional officer but to understand the process of becoming a correctional officer for Correctional Service Canada). Thus, the primary investigator has been in class for AMStrength training at the Academy.

³ Despite the length of the interviews, participant fatigue was not an issue in the current study.

Additional information

Funding

The current project is funded by a Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) Cataylst Grant, 411387.