Dear Corrections Employee:

The wife of a corrections officer once told me, “When my husband got a job at the Department of Corrections as a Corrections Officer, I had no idea that it was a package deal—that we’d be signing up too, as a family.”

Since then, I’ve heard similar statements expressed by other family members of corrections staff as they navigate through the uncharted waters of their loved one working in corrections, and while trying to understand and adapt to changes in their life as a family.

More often than not, your spouse and your other family members enter into the world of corrections uninformed and unprepared for the toll this occupation can take on you, and by extension on them, and the changes they will be experiencing in their home life as a result of your job demands.

Your family members are happy that you will have a steady paycheck with benefits. They are thrilled to hear that your paycheck could be augmented through the pay differential of shift work, through working on holidays, and through working overtime. But they do not yet know how these work conditions translate in real life, and how they can affect your family life and your well-being.

Your family members usually do not know or understand:

  • That, when you enter the corrections workforce, they too will enter a world with its own language and its own rules, a world which operates on basic assumptions that are vastly different from those of the free world
  • That in the corrections world things happen that are so far out of the ordinary, that if they were told to people on the street, many would just refuse to believe that they really happen
  • That your family’s established rhythms, traditions, and practices will be affected by the nature and demands of corrections work, and what may be needed to cope with that
  • The lifestyle changes that shift work, overtime, and changing schedules bring, and they are not mentally and practically prepared for the sacrifices that these changes require
  • That the corrections mindset will come home with you, and that as a result, in addition to acquiring desirable new skills, you might also be shaped negatively by the job, and become someone quite unlike who you used to be prior to starting your corrections career
  • Your department’s policies and procedures, your administrative regulations, your work circumstances and details, the work jargon you use
  • What it is like to work all night and try to sleep during the day
  • The power dynamics of the paramilitary rank structure that is now your workplace
  • Why you are chronically exhausted—both physically and emotionally
  • Why you no longer have the motivation to engage with your family like you used to do
  • Why your ability to emotionally connect with your family is becoming weaker over time, leading to emotional distance or even a feeling of becoming strangers to each other
  • Why you are becoming more impatient, irritable, or prone to anger outbursts for no apparent reason
  • Why you have developed insensitive “gallows” humor that may be appalling to them, rendering you not very likeable, and perhaps even repulsive to them
  • Why your use of profanity has sky-rocketed, often regardless of who is present
  • Why you talk to strangers curtly, perhaps even in hostile ways, indicating that you are assuming the worst about them
  • Why you are becoming more calloused, less compassionate, or more merciless towards others
  • Why you sometimes talk down to your family in demeaning, insulting, and hurtful ways
  • Why you order your family members around, trying to control their every move, sometimes even using the very same language with them that you would at work with individuals you manage
  • Why you are becoming increasingly stricter with your children, overly worried about their safety, laying down rigid rules, and even running background checks on their friends and their parents
  • Why you object to your family members going to certain places or associating with certain people
  • Why you turn down invitations to family gatherings, school events, or other social activities, so your family members may end up not going either or going alone —and being resentful about it
  • Why you are starting to show signs of serious anxiety, depression, or post-traumatic stress
  • Why you have increased your food, alcohol, and/or tobacco consumption, or why you now engage in other compulsive and escapist behaviors, such as excessive playing of video games, gambling, or online sexual activities
  • Why you are steadily gaining weight
  • Why your physical health is taking a turn for the worse, with your blood pressure and blood sugar readings no longer falling in the normal range
  • Why you cannot get through a sleep cycle without thrashing, yelling, kicking, or punching in your sleep

My clinical and training experience with corrections families is that if these issues are left unaddressed, they will eventually hurt marriages and parent-child relationships.

Families cannot continue with life as usual after one of them hires on in corrections. Proactive measures, preparation, and new learning are needed to protect your most valuable earthly investment—your family.