Stressed Out in Lock Down: The Impacts of Work in Extended Restrictive Housing on Prison Personnel

Abstract

Prior work on extended restrictive housing (ERH) has focused primarily on incarcerated persons rather than on potential impacts of this housing on personnel. Drawing on scholarship on the get-tough era, prison personnel, and ERH, we seek to shed light on contemporary correctional management practices and how doing so can illuminate the broad-ranging impacts of the get-tough era. We hypothesize that operational and organizational stressors differ for ERH personnel and may contribute to greater stress and adversely affect their mental and physical health. After presenting analyses from a mixed-methods study of Florida prisons, we discuss implications of the results for research and policy. We conclude that the get-tough era has led to harms, such as negative effects for personnel, that extend beyond those who are punished to those who play a role in systems of punishment and that have implications for understanding and addressing prison system safety and order.

Keywords:

• Solitary confinement
• restrictive housing
• personnel
• prison

Notes

1 An effect smaller than 0.50 is considered modest (Cohen 1992).

2 Only officers were included in the GPH group because most other staff reported that they had worked in ERH, and the remaining groups who had not were too few to include in the analyses.