Michael Van Patten’s 18-year-old son came home to find his dad crouching on the kitchen floor, gun in hand, a nearly empty bottle of gin by his side, tears running down his cheeks. Trevor grabbed the weapon, ran up to his room, shut the door and didn’t speak to his dad – or anyone – about the incident for 13 years.



For Michael, this was the build-up of nearly three decades working as a corrections officer at the Oregon state penitentiary. “The only way I knew how to deal with it was to eat a bullet.”

There is little awareness of how the culture of endemic violence in prisons affects the correction officers who interact with prisoners. But with over 2 million prisoners and around half a million COs, it is a widespread and underreported problem.

Corrections officers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder at more than double the rate of military veterans in the US, according to Caterina Spinaris, the leading professional in corrections-specific clinical research and founder of Desert Waters Correctional Outreach, a nonprofit based in Colorado.

This in turn inevitably affects prisoners. While there is no hard data on guard-on-inmate assaults, interviews with current and former corrections officers revealed that COs occasionally take out the stress of the job on inmates.

In 2011, Spinaris did an anonymous survey of corrections officers, testing them for indications of PTSD: repeated flashbacks of traumatic incidents, hyper-vigilance, insomnia, suicidal thoughts and alienation, among others. She found that 34% of corrections officers suffer from PTSD. This compares to 14% of military veterans.

The suicide rate among corrections officers is twice as high as that of both police officers and the general public, according to a New Jersey police taskforce. An earlier national study found that corrections officers’ suicide risk was 39% higher than all other professions combined.

Michael Van Patten in uniform: ‘The only way I knew how to deal with it was with a bullet.’ Photograph: Dasha Lisitsina

“Right now, we’re about where the military was 10, 15 years ago when it comes to them dealing with PTSD,” Van Patten tells me. Nearly 20 of his fellow officers have committed suicide since he started working in corrections. He nearly became a statistic himself.

Van Patten was assaulted when he was helping a nurse give a rectal exam to an inmate suspected of packing drugs. As he was reaching down to grab the inmate’s ankles to flip him over, the inmate came down on Van Patten’s back, dislocating his skull from his spinal vertebrae. Van Patten couldn’t walk for five months, nor could he hold his newborn child.

“It was a shock,” he said. “You don’t go to work expecting not to walk when you come home.”

Most of his job, around 95% as he estimates, is pretty mundane. Every day he does a cell count, keeps an eye on inmate’s activities, fetches someone toilet paper. This goes on for eight or, often, 16 hours straight – sometimes without a lunch break, depending on the day.

It’s the other 5% that leads to the extraordinarily high rate of PTSD: dealing with inmate violence, coming home with faeces smeared all over his uniform, trying to stop suicide attempts.

Van Patten said the biggest stress factor is not knowing when crisis situations may arise. This leads to permanent hyper-vigilance, “because we go into a place where we have control, but yet we don’t have control, because the inmates let us run the prison. If they wanted to, they could take it. They’re compliant until they choose not to be,” he said.

As soon as a CO enters a prison, he or she goes into battle mode. “We put on our armour. When you walk through the first gate, it clicks. And so does your back,” says Michael Morgan, an ex-officer at Oregon state penitentiary. “You’re in the pressure cooker” for at least eight hours – the duration of one shift.



Corrections wisdom dictates that you deal with trauma by not dealing with it at all. “They teach us to leave it at the gate,” said Morgan. “Eight and the gate” is the unofficial motto.

But even off-duty, the guards are always on edge. At an interview over lunch, Jeff Hernandez, another CO at Oregon state penitentiary, requested to swap places at a restaurant so he could sit facing the entrance of the room. This is a common quirk among those working in corrections.

COs say working in prison has significant long-term effects on your personality. Van Patten said the job changed him within six months. He became more cynical, withdrawn and aggressive.

“You almost become non-human, robotic, emotionless,” said Charles Ewlad, the warden at Riverhead correctional facility at the eastern end of New York’s Long Island. When he first started, “people came to work hammered every day. That was the deal.” This is no longer the status quo, though substance abuse is still a widespread coping mechanism.

“I went to work every day and I put this persona on,” Van Patten said. He has seen inmates show up at recreational activities with a nine-inch shank sticking out of their eye, others hang themselves, and still others cut their arteries and bleed to death.

“I didn’t know how to release the stuff I kept dreaming about. You’re doing tier count and you’re watching a human being die in front of your eyes because he’s coughing up lungs and screaming with his eyes for help and there’s nothing you can do,” Van Patten said. “Even though he’s an inmate, he’s still human; you’re still human.”

On the first day of work, his son Trevor – who also works as a corrections officer – remembers seeing the remains of a prisoner who was beaten to death by other inmates. “You see people smashing pumpkins on Halloween. Imagine all of the orange being red. And then all the orange on the outside being white. That’s what it looked like on first image. That’s a human being.” An hour after that he was eating lunch, then went back to work.

‘When I was struggling, nobody helped me’

In the years and months leading up to his attempted suicide, Michael suffered from all the typical symptoms of PTSD: insomnia, cold sweats, phantom violence while asleep. He worked out obsessively and self-medicated with alcohol.

He didn’t even know what PTSD was at the time. That’s partly because it’s not something that COs talked about. The culture is tough and macho, and any sign of vulnerability, especially a mental health diagnosis, carries stigma.

“Officers can never be weak. Inmates can never be weak. It’s its own world,” said Brian Baisley, the head of the medical evaluation unit at Riverhead.

Unlike a soldier returning from war or a policeman after an extraordinary incident, there’s little respite for a corrections officer. “You’re always still there,” he said. “It’s long periods of boredom, punctuated by excitement.”

Jeff Hernandez, the CO at Oregon state penitentiary, recalls one incident where an officer working on the notoriously difficult intensive management unit had a breakdown and burst into tears on the job. “I know from talking to several people there really still is an undercurrent of ‘You never should have done that on the unit’,” he said.

Hernandez is currently on medical leave for a physical condition, but when he stopped to greet another officer, the officer avoided asking him why – because, Hernandez says, “as far as they know, it could be PTSD. That’s very indicative of how people respond to that. No one knows how to approach it.”

PTSD is considered taboo partly because many fear a diagnosis will have negative repercussions on their career prospects.

“They won’t get diagnosed because of the stigma,” Michael Van Patten says. Many are afraid that they will be put through a “fit for duty” test with a state psychologist as a result, and will be decertified.

Some corrections officers at Oregon state penitentiary and Riverhead in Long Island do not think prison is a rehabilitative solution, merely a punitive one. “There’s got to be a better way to do things than put, say, James here in a corridor with 30 inmates for eight hours,” says Charles Ewlad, warden of Riverhead.

“We’re doing time too, we’re just getting paid for it,” says Brian Dawes, head of the American Correctional Officer Intelligence Network. The national average annual wage for a CO is $44,910, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In California this can go up to $100,000.

The Oregon state penitentiary: ‘There’s got to be a better way to do things’ than put someone in a corridor with 30 inmates for eight hours. Photograph: Dasha Lisitsina

In 2013, Van Patten decided to go public within his department about his attempted suicide, out of concern over the recent slate of staff suicides. “I finally thought that I’d been around there long enough, that someone had to break the ice.”

He recorded a video of himself speaking to his son Trevor about the incident. That was the first time they ever spoke about it together. The film was screened at the annual in-service training.

Jeff Hernandez remembers feeling shocked when he saw the video in that context: “I was not prepared because his personality has never been where I could even consider the possibility of him trying to do something like that.”

But some COs still feel the stigma of having mental health issues. Michael Morgan, the ex-CO, was diagnosed with PTSD. He said that when he reached out to the state’s mental health emergency hotline and the department during his extended breakdown, they were dismissive of him once he said that he wasn’t feeling suicidal.

“As far as I’m concerned the department of corrections did nothing for me,” Morgan said.

Morgan’s mental health struggles started when he was pulled over in 2010 for driving while drunk. He spent 32 hours on the other side of the bars for the first time while he was waiting to be arraigned. “I pretty much hit rock bottom,” he said. “When I was struggling, nobody helped me.”

A year later, he got a decertification notice based on multiple charges. He was working on the intensive management unit at the time and was awaiting to hear the results of his case.

“There were times when I got off a 12-hour shift that I would go out in my truck and I would turn the radio up as far as it would go for five to 10 minutes, just to feel something different that I could say: ‘OK, I can feel this rather than the other sensation’.”

It was during this period that Morgan ended up in the psychiatric ward. He was driving in the car with his wife when he pulled over, put on the emergency brake and told his wife to call the police on him: “I didn’t feel in control and I knew that that’s not a good thing.”

Morgan was diagnosed with PTSD on the psychiatric ward. Although this seal caused him a lot of anxiety, it actually helped him in his appeal to the decertification panel.

Once he submitted his medical paperwork, instead of firing him they transferred him from security to a non-security job under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

He is now the co-facilitator of a mental health training program at Oregon state penitentiary and, along with Michael Van Patten, is making an example of himself to raise awareness of PTSD.

“But,” Van Patten said, “you can’t change a culture over night.”