The Top 5 Tips New Correctional Officers Need to Know

1. Your Moral Compass Will Be Tested

You have two choices as a CO: you either bend your principles to conform to your actions OR you bend your actions to conform to your principles. See the difference? If you bend your principles to conform to your actions, you’re willingly going against your morals to excuse your actions. On the other hand, if you bend your actions to conform to your principles, you are forcing your efforts to fit the mold of the example you want to live by. 

Do you see which option lacks integrity and which option possesses it? If you lack integrity or are unaware of your morals, it’s time to figure them out because your moral compass will be tested daily at this job. This isn’t supposed to scare you, but it is supposed to be a reality check. And at the end of the day, you are given and trusted with power over other human beings. Let that soak in for a moment. 

Throughout your career, you will be presented with opportunities to take shortcuts that benefit you personally. If you can envision this happening, then this isn’t the profession for you. This isn’t a sales position where you get personal benefits here and there. A job as a corrections professional is quite the opposite, it takes an extremely selfless person to do this job. 

Preserving your integrity and remaining selfless in corrections means you’ll never shift your priorities to fit whatever is best for you. You continuously do what’s best for the well-being of the inmates and the agency. Again, you are trusted with the power you are given when you receive your badge. To maintain this trust and confidence others have in you, you need to prove you have good values by being confident and making the right decisions. 

Sound complicated? Well, it shouldn’t be. 

It isn’t difficult to prove your worth when you stick to your core beliefs. If all your decisions are honest and you’re confident in them, your trustworthiness will be proven in no time. Although being a “good guy” sounds simple, it’s very intentional. Having integrity means ensuring you’re doing the right thing every day, no matter what. Think you can handle it?

2. Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

Day one can be extremely overwhelming. You’re placed in a new environment with new people, rules, sights, and smells - new everything. Over time, you will likely even encounter new emotions you haven’t experienced. It’s no secret that this job challenges and impacts your mental well-being if the signs are ignored. 

When you’re a CO, you will inevitably experience emotional distress. The duties of this job are sometimes some of the most traumatic events that officers will ever experience. And unfortunately, COs have a sense of bravado that comes with a stigma that inhibits them from showing emotion or accepting support from others. Officers have to portray an image to the inmates, their fellow officers, and the public that they are strong, tough, and resilient without fail. If officers let their guard down and admit to needing help, they fear being perceived as “weak” or unfit for the job. 

However, that “hardness” can often bubble up and boil over if emotions aren’t handled properly. Unaddressed issues will inevitably damage social lives including marriages, parent-child relationships, and entire families. Without taking proactive measures to protect yourself, you will likely harm the one thing you try to protect the most - your family. 

Luckily, the trauma and emotional hardships that corrections officers face daily are becoming more recognized. Of course, muscle and grit are great, but so is the ability to fight off internal demons. Before figuring out how to heal, the first step is realizing that there is pain that needs healing. 

Dissociation involves staff disconnecting themselves from their true emotions and thoughts about a disturbing event - blocking them out of their awareness. I’ve heard numerous staff talk about how well they cope by shutting events out of their awareness, ‘compartmentalizing’ them. Putting these memories of unpleasant events (and the associated emotions) in ‘compartments’ amounts to engaging in dissociation. It’s like we have a crawl space under our house where we toss anything unpleasant or unwanted, and then leave, locking the door behind us. After a while, we don’t even know or remember what we’ve stuffed in that crawl space.

Caterina Spinaris, Ph.D., LPC

Founding Director of Desert Waters Correctional Outreach

Working in this profession, you will hear “awareness is key” over and over again, but typically it only refers to being aware of your physical surroundings. Instead, this phrase should also correlate with self-awareness of your mental state and well-being. Tackling the problem and figuring out how to address the trauma is a whole other story, but at least knowing that it exists is better than pretending you’re a stone-cold, heartless person. 

The next time you experience an incident that makes you force yourself to avoid looking away, take time to debrief and register your feelings. Checking yourself while experiencing trauma will help you avoid completely wrecking yourself to a numb pulp.

3. Fall Seven Times Stand Up Eight

“Fall seven times stand up eight,” is a saying that originated from a Japanese saying about resilience. While it sounds easier said than done, it's an important quote to live by when you work in a field that faces hurdles daily. It’s not a question of If but When you will encounter complicated situations throughout your day as a CO. How you manage these obstacles will determine how you will grow further in your position. 

To grow, you need to have a mindset that allows you to view each obstacle as an opportunity to take initiative. As a CO, you will thrive when you are capable of stepping up to the plate and making decisions on the fly. Of course, some decisions will be wrong. However, you can’t obsess over failures to the point where you lose confidence in your work and become hesitant in your decisions. After falling down, pick yourself up. Even if you fall seven times, pick yourself up eight. If you don’t, you will destroy your ability to grow in this profession.

“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.

C.S. Lewis

If you instill this proverb in your life, you may also appreciate an artwork style invented by Japanese culture, Kintsugi. This is a practice of repairing broken pottery by building the pieces back together with gold. The artwork serves as a deeper metaphor for embracing flaws by highlighting the cracks and scars. Just like how correctional officers have to pick themselves up after breaking apart from a failure, fixing something broken with a stronger foundation creates a more resilient and more beautiful piece of pottery (or person).

4. Know Your Policy Like the Back of Your Hand

The agency’s policy manual is one of the first things officers are given during their orientation period. They’re told to read the manual and are given an acknowledgment form to sign stating that they have read and understood it. This can be overwhelming for new officers as it’s a lot of information to absorb in their first week on the job. The manual is filled with new words and terms that officers have never heard of before or know little about, such as segregated housing, keep-separate, vicarious liability, PREA, classification, etc. 

However, officers often accept their policy manual and sign the acknowledgment form without fully reading their agency’s policies. This is a big no-no as this practice exposes both the officer and the agency to increased liability. It’s the agency's responsibility to ensure their officers are trained and knowledgeable of their agency policy. So, if you are a new officer and are put in this situation, make sure you read and understand your agency policy like the back of your hand.

 If you do not understand something, ask questions! Your Field Training Officer (FTO) and/or your shift supervisor should go over this information with you, if they don’t, stop and ask them to go over it with you because you will definitely have questions, especially as a newbie. For example, one of the most puzzling pieces about policy is understanding which are facility standards versus state standards. That’s right, they’re different. 

Not only does your specific facility have its own standards, but it may also be required to follow state standards. If you are located in a state that requires its facilities to follow state standards, then every facility within that state has to follow that specific state’s guidelines. It’s important to know and understand these standards on top of your own facility’s policies so you don’t accidentally violate a policy or violate an inmate’s rights. Most agencies have policies that mirror and/or meet their state’s standards. However, states and agencies constantly update their standards, and sometimes these documents conflict with each other. If you notice a conflict between the two, notify your supervisor.   

I wish someone would’ve told me when I first started that I needed to read the policy and procedure manual like you eat an elephant - one piece at a time. Every promotion I received came with a stack of new responsibilities. I learned to understand each one separately, rather than all together.

Chris Riedmueller

Product Trainer with GUARDIAN RFID

Fast forward a couple of years and now you’re done with training and on your own. Everything is going swimmingly, you know your agency policy and state jail standards like the back of your hand. But, while checking your email, you see a directive from your supervisor that conflicts with your current agency policy (this is bound to happen). What do you do? Do you follow your agency policy, or do you follow your supervisor’s directive? 

When this happens, you need to bring this up with your supervisor immediately so they can update the agency policy. Having conflicting policies and/or directives confuses staff and exposes the agency to liability. Thus, it is imperative to have a policy that specifically reflects current practice. If your actions follow agency policy, you will be in a much more defensible position to lawsuits.

5. Don’t Take Shortcuts

Imagine you’re at Point A and need to get to Point B. You are confronted with two roads to take to get to Point B. Both options will get you there, but they have different terrain. The first road is short and smooth, you can even see Point B from Point A. The second road starts smooth, but then grows into a steep mountain, blocking the view of Point A. Which road do you take? 

If you guessed the first option, you’re wrong. If you guessed the second option, you’re also wrong. There is only one correct answer to this question: “Which one is stated in the policy?” 

This job will present many opportunities for you to take shortcuts, some may be out of convenience while others could benefit you personally.  Shortcuts are not always necessarily a “bad” thing, sometimes taking shortcuts is more efficient and allows you to complete more work in less time. However, it gets messy if it violates your facility's policy and procedure handbook.

At the end of the day, policies and procedures were put in place for a reason. Taking shortcuts when you know you won’t get caught is not only dishonorable, but it’s also a very dangerous habit. Even the tiniest shortcut can wind you up in trouble because no matter how well you do your job, there’s always somebody looking for an error. If you get caught taking even the tiniest shortcut, you will lose all credibility and reliability. Why? Because if you can’t accomplish the smallest of things, then your supervisor won’t trust you to accomplish anything, and once you lose credibility, your reputation is tarnished. 

Don’t think it’s that big of a deal? Imagine you’re working in your housing unit during the assigned night shift. It’s time to conduct your next security check, but you’ve had a long day and are exhausted. You realize you did a security check only an hour ago and verified all inmates were sound asleep in their bunks. Nothing has changed since then, right? So you mark your security check as complete when you didn’t physically get up to check. Nobody is watching. Who is going to know, right? It’s not a big deal. 

Hours later during your shift change, the oncoming officer finds an inmate hanging in their cell. Investigators show up and your paper logs are requested as part of the investigation. Cameras within the housing unit prove you falsified your jail checks. Oops, it was a big deal after all. Not only will you lose your job with this agency, but your career as a correctional officer is over. On top of that, there is a good chance you will be charged criminally and civilly.

In conclusion, when you Google the job description of “corrections officer” and it says, “maintaining order,” it doesn’t necessarily explain that it comes with an entire lifestyle of always staying on your toes. The beginning of the Correctional Officer’s Prayer states, “Lord, as I report to work each day, in this place of block and steel, I ask that you would have my back, the dangers here are real.” (Where does it say that in the job description?) 

That’s why it’s critical to connect yourself with like-minded team members with the same values, beliefs, and respect for the work as you do. These are the people who will help you grow in your position and throughout your career. Hopefully, these five tips protect you, your team, and the other 480,000+ correctional officers across the country who are defending America’s Thin Gray Line from the obstacles that come with the job.