Community Government Police & Fire

Bill would make it easier for corrections officers to be covered for PTSD

A year into his tenure as a correctional officer, Brandon Jennings responded to a suicide attempt. He remembers pulling an inmate from their cell and performing CPR for nearly a dozen minutes. After taking the weekend off, he was back at work two days later. 

Jennings, a sergeant at the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Gig Harbor, can recall a number of similarly traumatic incidents from his nearly two-decade long career working in Washington’s correctional system. The Navy veteran often leans on his wife, who also works at the prison, for support.

Others may not have that outlet. Many feel isolated or like they have nowhere to turn, he said. They struggle with their mental health, resort to excessive drinking, see relationships suffer or — in dire cases — have suicidal ideations.

“We’ve had people commit suicide because they can’t handle it,” Jennings said. “Tons of people get divorced because they’re bringing their work home.”

Presumptive coverage

Corrections officers die by suicide at higher rates than police, yet have largely been excluded from expansions in mental health treatment for first responders, said state Rep. Lauren Davis, D-Shoreline. Seeking to rectify that, Davis introduced legislation last month that would make it easier for correctional officers to receive workers compensation for  treatment of post traumatic stress disorder.

Her bill, House Bill 1070, would give correctional officers presumptive coverage for PTSD, meaning they would no longer need to prove that their condition was work related for reimbursement.

“With a presumption, the law says that the work caused it. All we need from the doctor is the diagnosis,” Brenda Heilman, assistant director of insurance services at the Washington Department of Labor and Industries, told legislators during a committee meeting last month. 

“We don’t need [the physician’s] opinion about medical relationships because the law has established that,” she said. 

State law generally excludes mental health conditions from being compensated as an occupational disease: A condition that arises naturally from one’s work environment. Recently, though, legislators have carved out exceptions for some high-stress jobs.

Other workers already covered

Bills passed in 2018 and 2019 allowed firefighters, law enforcement, EMTs and fire investigators to claim PTSD as an occupational disease. It also awarded them presumptive coverage through the Department of Labor and Industries after a decade of employment.

Emergency telecommunication workers can also file claims, although they don’t get a presumption. Direct care registered nurses were added last year, and give a presumption after working 90 days in Washington. The new legislation would add correctional officers after 90 consecutive days of employment.

Jennings, the corrections sergeant, says he has never sought a diagnosis for post traumatic stress disorder, something the state DOC estimates a third of correctional officers have. Still, he acknowledges his line of work is difficult. 

Most in the general public do not understand how tough it can be, he said. Officers see fights daily and co-workers tell him they feel like they have nowhere to turn to to get help. Many struggle. 

“I suppose most of us should all actually go in for it,” he says of PTSD. “because working in a prison setting you’re always watching your back.”

Causes of PTSD among COs

Employees at the WCCW as well as the 10 other prisons in Washington are regularly exposed to fights, assaults and other potentially traumatic events, said Chris Wright, a DOC spokesperson. 

“It’s a challenging, stressful profession and the life expectancy of a correctional officer is much lower than the general public,” he said.

National data lays that out: correctional officer experience depression, PTSD and commit suicide at significantly higher rates than the national average, according to the Vera Instuite of Justice. On Average, officers live 16 years less than the general population.

Following a critical incident, DOC employs its Resilience Support Team. The team evaluates the situation and determines whether to send employees to a staff psychologist. There is no requirement for time off or formal assessment following a staff assault or involvement in critical incident.

Brenda Wiest, vice president & director of government affairs for Teamsters Local 117, which represents more than 6,000 correctional employees, says their members experience traumatic events like police, but often with fewer moments of respite. Corrections officers have to be hypervigilant for the duration of their shifts. They have to be ready for the possibility of fights, assaults, deaths, or medical emergencies at any moment.

Members of Teamsters Union Local 117 at the state capitol in Olympia on Jan 29. Photo courtesy Local 117

They also have had to increasingly deal with inmates who suffer from untreated behavioral health challenges, like substance abuse or a mental illness. Drug use remains a challenge in the prison system, Wiest said.

“Our people, corrections, frontline staff, don’t have the training to deal with folks who are seriously mentally Ill,” she said. “I mean you’re gonna learn it on the job, but it doesn’t make it easy and it means that the behavior isn’t always predictable.”

Support from DOC

Davis, the state representative, has spent her career working on suicide prevention programs and has worked closely with prisons across the state, primarily on reentry programs. During that time, correctional officers recounted the “horrors they had to witness,” but many had foregone treatment for PTSD, she said.

Because the condition is not presumptive, officers have to pay at their own expense to essentially litigate their conditions and establish a relationship to their work, she said.

“At present, a lot of individuals are not actually getting treatment.” Davis said, noting delayed care can result in worse outcomes, including higher risks of suicide. “It’s just not compassionate.”

Providing broader access to treatment will be beneficial, Davis says. But she argues the state must do more upstream to mitigate traumatic instances so correctional officers don’t get to the point where they meet criteria for PTSD. 

She is not throwing the DOC under the bus. The department would be “over the moon” if the state provided them funding  for these preventative programs, she said. Yet even before a million-dollar budget crisis hit the state, legislators had not been providing those kinds of resources to the DOC. 

Treating inmates

Part of the solution, Davis says, involves providing better health care for the incarcerated. Few inmates who meet criteria for substance use disorder or a mental health condition get treatment while in the care of the DOC.

Often, only those with the most severe diagnosis get long-term treatment. The majority of inmates do not receive interventions like medication-assisted treatment until they are a few months away from release. That means for most of their tenure, they live with an untreated condition that can lead to poor outcomes.

“There are ways to, not eliminate, but reduce the amount of trauma that [officers] experience,” Davis said. “I think we owe it to them to do that. We also owe it very much to our incarcerated population.”