“My girlfriend is going to kill herself,” the woman said. “I have a girlfriend who’s a corrections officer, and she’s talking about killing herself. I just don’t know what to do.”
Norman Seabrook, president of the New York City Corrections Officers’ Benevolent Association, is recounting a phone call he received two weeks ago from a distraught woman named Melanie. After almost 20 years working under the relentless stress of a New York City jail, Melanie’s corrections officer girlfriend had had enough.
Seabrook sent one of his union’s board members to the institution where the officer in question worked. “She lost it,” says Seabrook. “Turns out we found a straight-edge razor in her car, she’s threatening to commit suicide.… She was taken to Beth Israel hospital. Nineteen years as a New York City corrections officer, and she says, ’I have nothing else left to live for. I’m going to cut my throat at lunchtime.’”
New York’s corrections system has come under scrutiny since the death of inmate Jerome Murdough, who was held in an overheated cell in the Rikers Island jail; a subsequent report by The New York Times detailed the mistreatment of mentally ill inmates. Around the same time, New York’sDaily News reported a surge in assaults on the prison’s staff by inmates. According to the New York Post, a “blood roster” was found recently in a cell on Rikers Island; it contained the names of 10 corrections officers targeted by the Bloods gang.
Rarely mentioned in such reports is what experts see as a growing problem: the mental health of corrections officers, who, according to one study, have rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) comparable to military combat veterans.
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/06/06/prison-officers-need-help-they-wont-ask-it-252439.html?piano_t=1
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