Florence – Prisoners fling bodily waste and attack without warning. Psychotic outbursts fill halls with howls. A man who upset the wrong clique ended up with a pencil driven though his ear.

Yet for correctional officers, getting mad isn’t allowed.

Now these men and women, who face growing numbers of inmates in some of the nation’s toughest federal and state prisons, say they’re increasingly overwhelmed.

They harden themselves to survive inside prison, guards said in recent interviews. Then they find they can’t snap out of it at the end of the day.

Some seethe to themselves. Others commit suicide. Depression, alcoholism, domestic violence and heart attacks are common. And entire communities suffer.

“You’re not normal anymore,” said Hondray Simmons, 36, an Iraq war veteran now working in the Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañon City.

Guard woes are so epidemic in Fremont County, a hub for the booming prison industry, that an enterprising therapist chose this area to launch an emotional-rescue campaign – the first of its kind in the country.

Prison guards work in “an unrecognized war zone,” said Caterina Spinaris, 53, who left a lucrative psychological counseling practice in Denver six years ago. She was looking for a pastoral paradise in Florence, a three- stoplight town by the Arkansas River.

Instead, “heartaches opened up,” she said, “and wouldn’t go away.”

Now she counsels scores of brittle men and women at her nonprofit Desert Waters Correctional Outreach center, a mile from the ultra-high- security federal “Supermax” prison.

Letting go of what’s held in

From Colorado and across the nation, 168 correctional officers, including several on the brink of suicide, have called or sent e-mails asking for help, Spinaris said. “We’re winning trust little by little.”

Prison work “bleeds over into your private life. You go into restaurants, you sit with your back to the wall. You want to see all the entrances and exits, and you notice if somebody is carrying something bulky. You can’t turn these skills off,” said Matthew von Hobe, 50, a former manager at the four-prison federal complex in Florence.

He knows of two colleagues who committed suicide.

Once in the medium-security workshop where von Hobe worked, two trusted inmates got into a fistfight over a pen. One grabbed an oak board with a sharp edge, swinging it like a bat before guards could react. He bashed in the other inmate’s skull.

Another day, an inmate who crossed into a rival gang’s television area and changed the channel later was found dead, a pencil driven into his brain through one ear.

Dealing with horrors like these led to divorce, von Hobe said.

“If your spouse doesn’t want to hear about disembowelments in prison, who are you going to talk to? You suppress it,” he said.

When Spinaris arrived, guards from the 13 prisons in the area at first shunned her counseling. Then in July 2005, she set up a toll-free “Corrections Ventline” that lets guards anonymously blow off steam before they head home.

Family-practice doctors around Fremont County say they typically put troubled guards on antidepressant drugs and then send them to Spinaris for help.

A staggering downside

Prisons have buoyed southern Colorado economically, providing thousands of jobs with retirement and health benefits that pay around $36,000 a year, lower than police and firefighter pay but enough to support a family in this area.

Yet research suggests a staggering downside. Correctional officers’ life expectancy hovers around 59 years, compared with 77 for the U.S. population overall, according to insurance data.

Prison jobs promise a comfortable retirement, “but many of these guys don’t live long after they retire,” said Dr. Gary Mohr in Cañon City, who has treated guards who had heart attacks.

Their work forces guards “to put up a shield,” Mohr said. “It’s hard to take that shield off when you go home. It’s hard to open up to the wife and kids.”

Spinaris’ work is groundbreaking, he said. “The guards I’ve sent to her, they’ve come back feeling a lot better. … They say: ‘I’m not losing my mind. I’ve just got a really stressful job.”‘

Short staffing as the U.S. prison population tops 2.2 million leaves guards short-tempered and prone to “rage attacks” directed at family, said Dr. Robert McCurry, another local physician.

The environment behind bars brings out the worst in everyone, said a former prison staffer now helping domestic-violence victims at Cañon City’s Family Crisis Center.

“If the person has the propensity for abuse, it’s definitely going to come out when they work in this profession,” she said, asking to remain anonymous to protect a child abused in her own family.

The suicide rate among prison guards is 39 percent higher than the average for other occupations, an Archives of Suicide Research study found.

At Florence, at least nine federal guards have committed suicide since 1994, according to former employees and Spinaris. Federal Bureau of Prisons officials confirmed five staff suicides in the Florence facilities since 1997 – and 45 nationwide.

The bureau now offers psychological counseling through an arrangement with a Public Health Service agency, spokeswoman Felicia Ponce said. Guards using a 24-hour help line can reach counselors trained to discuss emotional, family and financial problems. “They can either talk to someone at the time they call or set up an appointment.”

Colorado state prison officials say that they don’t track suicides but that at least two guards killed themselves over the past five years.

The suicide rate in semirural Fremont County consistently ranks near the highest in Colorado: 41.8 per 100,000 residents in 2005, more than twice the statewide rate of 16.8.

Trauma stays after cuts heal

Among the first guards asking Spinaris for help was Cory Hodges, 37. A rising star at the high-security U.S. Penitentiary, Hodges worried his work was hurting him as a husband and new father.

Then, in February 2003, an inmate jumped Hodges. Gripping a 6-inch sharpened copper shank, the prisoner repeatedly stabbed Hodges in the face and neck. Only Hodges’ glasses prevented him from losing his right eye, he said.

Another guard fled. Inmates chased and cut up a third guard. They surrounded Hodges for more than three minutes until he was rescued.

“They were screaming and yelling, ‘Kill him! Kill him!”‘ Hodges recalled.

The puncture wounds healed, but the trauma remained. Supervisors offered no counseling. A warden asked only when he’d be back at work.

Hodges switched to the adjacent Supermax, where inmates are deemed high risk but mostly are confined alone in double-door cells 23 hours a day.

“I can’t seem to get along with anyone anymore,” Hodges wrote to Spinaris a year ago. “I can’t tolerate anyone. It’s like I could care less if everyone fell off the face of the Earth. It seems that the only people I want close to me are my wife and my son, and they don’t want to be close to me because I am so miserable all of the time.”

Today Hodges works as a railroad engineer based in Texas. He credits Spinaris with saving his life, but he still struggles.

“You still question everything people do. You treat other people like you treat convicts,” Hodges said. “You don’t wipe this out in a year. I don’t know if it ever goes away.”

While he and others in federal and state prisons are reluctant to go into detail about their work, they also yearn to let outsiders know what they face.

Prisoners routinely bomb guards with urine and feces. Female correctional officers face unique abuse. As they make their rounds, male inmates sometimes strip and masturbate, said Anne Gard, 47, a correctional officer at the penitentiary now out on disability.

Mandatory sentencing laws, and less time off for good behavior, reduce leverage that guards need to control prisoners, Gard said.

When she drove home after penitentiary shifts, she found her instincts as a wife and mother of three children impaired.

Her 8-year-old daughter was “a chronic spiller” at the dinner table, Gard said. “I made it worse because I would always overreact.”

Working at Supermax, veteran correctional officer Gary Kapolites found himself hard-pressed to get out of bed, while his schoolteacher wife raced to her work with passion.

A 225-pound former football player, Kapolites once took pride in cuffing inmates, inserting tubes up the noses of those on hunger strike, or enforcing rules when inmates refused to cooperate.

But after 10 years in Supermax, he said, “that grew shallow.” Kapolites said he became uncomfortable with what seemed like sensory deprivation to break prisoners’ will.

He quit after the last time he was called to lead an “extraction” – removing a recalcitrant inmate from a cell.

He’d done these many times before, at the front of a line of guards, everyone decked out in Kevlar and helmets, cameras rolling for legal protection.

Kapolites plowed into the inmate, lifting him and feeling him collapse “like a powder puff” as fellow guards piled on to handcuff the inmate. Kapolites won praise as the guards reviewed their extraction on film.

But he just felt hollow.

“That one really changed me,” he said. “You expect resistance. When I hit him, there wasn’t any resistance.”

Now he supports Spinaris’ efforts to reach more guards and their families.

Correctional officers, he said, “are doing time too. … A lot of them are not able to detach. … Alcohol problems. Domestic violence. They have a propensity. The very things they are supposed to be against, they end up doing.

“You can’t just wash it off like in a shower.”

Staff writer Bruce Finley can be reached at 303-954-1700 or bfinley@denverpost.com.

Online: Video of an interview with a correctional officer. denverpost.com.