Rosemary Ricciardelli, Ph.D., is the Research Chair in Safety Security & Wellness for the Fisheries & Marine Institute at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She has written extensively about staff wellness in public safety organizations; specifically in corrections. This interview was conducted by IACFP Executive Director Cherie Townsend, and has been edited and condensed.
Cherie Townsend:
Currently, correctional systems are experiencing significant challenges with recruitment and retention of staff. In the past staff would work in corrections as a lifetime career. From your perspective, what has changed?
Rosemary Ricciardelli:
The prison population is changing. There's a change in who's incarcerated, and people don't do time in the same way. There was a structure to doing time that people had to learn. But the people who don't adhere to the informal and formal rules; they're unpredictable. It's not that mental health is getting worse, but that mental health problems and brain injuries are getting more pronounced and drugs are having greater effects on people. So we're seeing people engage in behaviors that are extreme. Combine that with the changing needs of the workforce, and the results include challenges with recruitment and retention.
Townsend:
We are hearing that as systems seek to decarcerate, the remaining population has multiple issues and very serious mental health conditions, because they were the hardest to decarcerate.
Ricciardelli:
Often too, the hardest to decarcerate are the people who are never going to commit another crime. It's often lifers, right? The people who have the lowest rates of recidivism are the people who can't be decarcerated because of societal perceptions.
Townsend:
This is having an impact on the prison population. The impacts on staff now are also dramatic. Have we gone beyond the point where we can recruit people to these positions?
Ricciardelli:
There's a huge change in what people want in a career, and the new generations have different needs for their fulfillment. It's a different world. I think that is impeding the ability to recruit and retain staff. In the correctional workspace, you need to protect the people incarcerated and you can't disclose a lot of information; particularly all the nuances of the work. It's really hard to attract people when you can't share the nuance.
Townsend:
What do you think people are doing well at the organizational level? People are starting to get desperate about what they're facing in terms of staffing – how do they address wellness in a way that they can see some immediate effects as well as longer-term results?
Ricciardelli:
I think that's a really difficult but important question. One of the things that I've been noticing a lot is that people are coming up with wellness strategies that are trying to hear more from the front line. One of the challenges I'm seeing is where the person in charge of the wellness strategy is trying to hear from the front line but recognizes that what they’re hearing was from 20 years ago and things have changed, because the front line is not the front line from even five years ago. We need to always listen and hear the voices of the front line in order to make change.
I do think there is incremental cultural change happening where it's okay to talk about mental health, but it's often not until a person experiences adversity that they recognize and are okay with talking about the adversity. When people in leadership positions understand it's not a weakness, then the organization thrives more than when you have a nagging bias of “suck it up, let's go.” So that really impacts things.
There are simple solutions like just being positive, telling people that they've done a good job. It's amazing what an impact it makes. And there are other components, like different wellness strategies that are designed to reduce stigmas, reduce barriers, and increase understanding. What I'm doing right now with one police service is something I hope others can do. This police service has a very robust expenditure for a variety of mental health programs for their staff. I'm evaluating them to see what works, what needs to be done to make it work better, and to get rid of what doesn't work or to re-envision what doesn't work. I think this is really important:
"Don't create new—look at what you have, evaluate it, and make it better. It doesn't always have to require a new influx of money. You don't need 30 programs; you need effective programs."
–Rosemary Ricciardelli, Ph.D.
Townsend:
While staff may be honest with their therapist or healthcare provider, the challenge is still the attitudes that first-line supervisors may have either to health or wellness. There's still a stigma, both for health and mental health issues.
Ricciardelli:
And if you do a safeguard like a mandated appointment that’s necessary to continue in your job, those outcomes are never confidential. I'm looking at creating a psych support service stocked with peer support. We would have trained mental health professionals doing CISM (Critical Incident Stress Management), it becomes group therapy. Ontario is doing this with peer support: They activate peer support every time there's an incident, so people are exposed to it and more likely to talk to those peers. You could activate that with someone clinical who understands what is necessary. I think the cost would be the same and the effectiveness would be increased.
Townsend:
In Canada, you have such an incredible wealth of psychological services. You have a lot of psychologists in the service or attached to the service. We're seeing in some other areas where there aren't licensed professionals to provide services.
Ricciardelli:
There's a lack of these professionals, and the only psychologists in the services right now are for the residents in the prison, not for the staff.
Corrections is never going to be amazingly funded. Society is too polarized in how they feel about the persons who are incarcerated…they're always going to push back to give them less. And there needs to be this blanket of confidentiality to protect the rights of those incarcerated, which prevents the ability for people to see where help is needed.
Townsend:
Correctional officers, psychologists and anyone working in the service have the most interaction with their colleagues, but their second-most consistent interactions are with their first-line supervisors. What can first-line supervisors do to support the wellbeing of their staff?
Ricciardelli:
It’s important that front-line supervisors, correctional managers, wardens, leaders, etcetera, are able to provide the support for the persons working under them. But at the same time, we have to be conscientious of the responsibility we’re giving them. People in management roles and higher fare worse mentally than people working the front lines, probably because they worked their way through the system. It's so isolating and alienating in those positions. We need to do more for their wellness too, because if you don't have a healthy leader, everything will fall apart. A starting point is to draw attention to how much we need to do to support the health and wellness of leadership, and do more to give them a collectivity so they're not just responsible for everything that happens below.
Townsend:
What impact does working the units have on people? Considering what they have to do to work through their day and manage those individuals, and then leave the prison at the end of their shift, it must be a shock as they go back and forth.
Ricciardelli:
One of the things that was really pronounced to me was moral injury. It was moral harm watching residents not avail of resources or have setbacks in their progress. I saw a woman get transferred from working in a max setting to a structured living unit, and I celebrated that. She did two great days. I came in a day later and she had self-harmed. It's like a kick in the teeth, because you want to see them continue to excel and you believe in it.
This is the thing, when we do this work and we make change, we can do positive things for everyone's wellness, but there's always going to be a relapse. And it's almost like working through anything: We just have to keep pushing the bar forward a bit more and anticipate there are going to be setbacks. Incremental change takes time. You can't give up when there's a relapse.
Townsend:
That relapse is really hard, isn't it? The cumulative effect of those relapses really seems to wear people down.
Ricciardelli:
I'm really conscious of the moral injury because it's the thing we can't contextualize. You do the best job you can and get crucified in the media and you have no voice to talk. It's hurtful. It's hard.
I use the more extreme example that if you're a police officer, a firefighter, a paramedic, any of these jobs outside of corrections, and someone takes your life, that person goes to prison and serves a sentence. If you're working a max unit and a lifer takes your life, nothing happens to them. They have what? A $500 fine and they serve a second sentence at the same time as the first one they were serving. There's no change. They go back to their cell. How is that not morally injurious to know your life is worth 500 bucks? It's complicated, right?
Townsend:
It is complicated. I think one of the challenges right now seems to be trying to offer people some supports. This whole idea that you're focusing on – looking at what they're doing and trying to build upon that as opposed to creating something new – is important.
Ricciardelli:
There are two challenges with something new. One, things take time to be palatable. You can implement something now and it's going to take five years from now to actually be in use. If you keep introducing new stuff, no one's ever going to use it. It requires longevity and people need to build trust.
The other thing is that we need to make sure things are working the way they're meant to work. We need to evaluate things with a control group. What happens when they actually have the intervention? What happens when they don't? Let's find out what works and what doesn't work. What works, let's embrace and make better; what doesn't work, let's reinvigorate it.
We have to create things that work within the spaces for it. It's no different than when I'm doing interviews. I talk to one, two, three people; they find it beneficial. They tell three people who then tell three people. Next thing you know, I'm talking to everyone under the sun because they know they can trust me. That's the same with these programs. People have to go through them without feeling adverse impacts, find that they’re better off, and then recommend it to others. That takes time.
Townsend:
Our readers fall into the categories of researchers, practitioners, and students. The students aspire to become either researchers or practitioners in the correctional and forensic mental health space. What advice would you give them in terms of their own work and their own wellbeing?
Ricciardelli:
Twofold: One, when they're doing work, evaluate and use control groups. Go with the science, follow the science, keep your opinions aside, focus on what the data shows. Because the best compliment you can get as a researcher is when your work resonates. If people don’t see themselves in your work, your work is not reflective. Do reflective work that people can learn from, build off, and extend. Have a control group if you're doing any kind of evaluations so you can see what is a result of the intervention and what is just normative, changing culture of practices, etc. Secondly, self-care is really important. Do things that also keep yourself sane.
Townsend:
Is there anything else that you think it's important for people to know about in this space in terms of leadership and taking care of other people that work in this space?
Ricciardelli:
One of the key things to know is that traumatic events happen…adverse events, incidents, whatever we want to call them. What determines how things progress is the support from colleagues and management after an incident. If a person feels like they're supported through the adverse event and are made to feel whole, they will fare better than If they feel ostracized, alienated, and like they did something wrong. It is the most consistent thing I hear: If they feel that the split-second decision they had to make is now going to result in use-of-force investigations or criminal charges, and they don't feel they have the support of the people working with them and the person senior to them, it's a recipe for disaster. We need to find ways to be there for individuals if we want them to be mentally healthy.
Townsend:
It sounds like it’s important to look at the way in which we support people through those investigations, but also the way in which those investigations are conducted. It's a scary process, and it has to be objective and look at facts and be done in a healthy way.
"...if you don't have a healthy leader, everything will fall apart.”
—Rosemary Ricciardelli, Ph.D.
Ricciardelli:
Because it's a trauma response, right? We need to be there for people and not judge them for who they are in a moment of stress and tension because so many factors are impacting that reaction. Even if someone is clearly wrong, they don't need to be vilified. They know they're wrong. Investigations make victims feel like perpetrators. That's really important to recognize. We need to do more to be there for people who are going through adverse events, because the most important thing is keep the person whole. If we keep them whole, we keep them alive.
Staff are exposed to so many things and are traumatized, and one trauma reaction is pretending not to care. In corrections, you are trained to be stoic, to be solid in emotion, to not react. That does not mean we don't feel things.
Townsend:
Many of the people that we work with are behavioral interventionists, counselors, psychologists, and they're constantly exposed to trauma. They're trained to care and to be supportive, but also to not get involved personally. But they are bombarded with the most incredible trauma.
Ricciardelli:
It's all about boundary construction. It's really hard because boundaries are social and malleable. The officers care; I saw it, they can't hide it. They wouldn't know how to crochet with a prisoner if they didn't care. You can't know that that person's child graduated university if you're not caring. I saw more compassion in a week in a woman's prison than I've seen in a week in any other space in my life. You see adversity, you see difficulties, you see challenge, you see all those other things, but those acts of compassion in such a difficult space takes so much from people and it's absolutely incredible.
Townsend:
Do supervisors see that?
Ricciardelli:
Yeah.
Townsend:
Do leaders get to see that, do you think most of the time?
Ricciardelli:
Not as much, because the environment changes. You can't shadow a 16-hour shift without people being authentic. Everyone's authentic by the end of it. I have the utmost respect for people who do shift work. I am a privileged academic, I own it, I am accountable for it. My God, I've never seen a clock move so slow in my life. It was horrific. You're exhausted, you can barely keep your eyes open. It's like five hours of struggling. You make it to the end of the shift, you get to your bed and it's like, bing, wide awake. It doesn't even make sense. And then you only get tired an hour before you're going back for your next shift. I'm like, how is this humanly possible? I was dealing with the sleep dysregulation, I was dealing with all these things and I was just like…all the compassion, all the training, all the stuff you guys do that I absolutely respect, you guys also do it on shift.
"We need to find ways to be there for individuals if we want them to be mentally healthy."
—Rosemary Ricciardelli, Ph.D.
Townsend:
I think doing that kind of shift work periodically helps to put some reality into the research that you do. And I think that's part of the reason why you're able to bring forth so much compassion in the research.
Ricciardelli:
I use a very large sample and I don't report on tiny nuances. That actually aggravates me. I've done interviews with 150 parole officers and maybe three of them have a challenge working with sex offenders; I would never write a paper saying “parole officers who work with sex offenders struggle,” because it describes a small subsection of a greater population. It would misrepresent. I don't think a sample size of three warrants representation or generalizability.
So if I have a big sample, I don't report on things that fewer than 50 people said. I owe them that because I'm not going to disrespect them by pretending that's the norm. It paints people incorrectly, and then the researchers don't get access anymore. Then they're all upset that they don't get access. How are you going to get access when you misrepresent what you find? I see really good people being misinterpreted by one little, one-off negative thing.
We’re scientists. Replication is key to science. If you're not reproducing consistent results and you don't want to do replications because it's boring, then you're not doing science. Evaluate it, test it, figure it out, because people's lives are on the line.
Townsend:
I think people are starting to really look at the potential impacts and consequences of the work and mental health considerations and suicide risk. I think in the past, they did not address that because they thought that one or two incidents reflected on those individuals, as opposed to the bigger issues for the whole.
Ricciardelli:
I have two arguments that I want to make. One is that prison research shouldn't just be for people who study prisons. We need people who specialize in immunization and public health and management and all these things working in the prison space, so it should be broader. And the other thing that I think is fundamentally important in working in the prison space is that if we made our work more applicable and it resonated more, more people would use it. If we got it right more often, there'd be more space. It's hard to trust someone who's saying things that don't represent the reality in which you live. So it makes you question the quality and the value of research.
We need to think things through and we need to be conscientious. We are working in a space where those who work and those who reside in these spaces are made vulnerable by their environment. It's really important we get it right.
