Fight or Flight and Movies About Prison

Why do most of our "prison movies" portray staff in a certain way? And what do the instinctual responses to danger - fight or flight - tell us about prison neighborhoods?  And what can compassionate people on the inside do to be supportive of EVERYONE behind the fence, no matter which way they typically respond to threat? Join Sabrina for this episode, and ask yourself some interesting questions.

http://prisoncare.org/community.html
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Time Markers:
(0:58) Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn

(3:02) Backs to the Wall

(6:07) In the Movies

(8:26) Wired to Fight

(12:08) Correction’s Counseling

(15:50) Mental Health Stigma is Everywhere

(19:59) A Significant Drop in Life Expectancy

(22:00) Are You Having These Conversations?

You can also view this episode on YouTube!
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg1zYh48GV5KRMrz_FikIRcndtiWBqZbD


Intro/Outro MUSIC CREDIT: We've Come A Long Way (No Vocal Version) Exzel Music Publishing (freemusicpublicdomain.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Transcript

Welcome to the PrisonCare Podcast!

I’m Sabrina Justison, founder of PrisonCare.org, equipping compassionate people to support the often-invisible people groups who make up a prison neighborhood - the inmate residents, correctional officers, staff, administration, and the families of all of these folks. 

Join me for this week’s episode, and be encouraged to think, care, and respond as we explore the challenges facing prison neighborhoods everywhere. 

Let’s support positive prison culture from the outside, because EVERYone on the inside matters. 

http://prisoncare.org/community.html

Learn more about PrisonCare, Inc. and donate to our work

Time Markers:

(0:58) Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn

(3:02) Backs to the Wall

(6:07) In the Movies

(8:26) Wired to Fight

(12:08) Correction’s Counseling

(15:50) Mental Health Stigma is Everywhere

(19:59) A Significant Drop in Life Expectancy

(22:00) Are You Having These Conversations?

Intro/Outro MUSIC CREDIT:
 We've Come A Long Way (No Vocal Version)
 Exzel Music Publishing (freemusicpublicdomain.com)
 Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

=================

Hello friends, Sabrina here and it's wonderful to have you listening to this episode of the PrisonCare podcast.

(0:58)

We are going to take a look at Correctional staff today. And we’re going to talk about something that we know to be true about human response to stress. So we are all familiar with the idea of the fight or flight response. Right? This is something that has kept us alive since prehistoric days. If a saber-toothed tiger was chasing you, you got this rush of adrenaline. Your brain caused your body to create lots and lots of adrenaline so you could run fast to get away from that saber-toothed tiger. That would be flight or so you could pick up your weapon and turn around and fight that saber-toothed tiger, right? Either way the idea is that our bodies respond to danger, to stress, to threat by sending messages… create lots and lots of adrenaline and cortisol and let's fight or let's flee, right? Now, there’s a third thing and when you really look into to work being done with trauma and Trauma recovery, yes. There's fight, flight, freeze where you're just paralyzed by it or fawn, which is to try to appease and try to pacify and make the attacker decide not to attack you after all. 

But we're going to specifically lean into just the basics of fight or flight today. And we're going to look at COs because COs live in a workplace… well, they work in a workplace, they practically live there… but where the threat of danger, of violence is real and it's all day.  They live in a workplace where they are constantly endangered and there is a condition called hyper-vigilance that grows out of living in a place where you are never safe, where you can never just let down. 

(3:02)

Okay, COs are known for always choosing to sit with their back to a wall or stand with their back to a wall. They always position themselves in a room so that their eyes can stay on the door. They don't like to be blocked between where they are and whatever the exit point is in that room, they want to clear path, right? And these are things that, that develop subconsciously, it's not that a CO goes to a Christmas party at your aunt's house and says, now I'm going to stand here so that I have a wall to my back and I can get out the door quickly without there being any tables between me and the door, right? 

This is not a conscious thing but this is just the result of hours, upon hours, upon hours working in an environment where having something other than a wall at your back might mean that you get jumped. Where not having a clear exit might mean that you get taken hostage, right? There is legitimate physical threat on the job for a CO every day and so hyper-vigilance grows out of that and correctional officers find themselves dwelling in a perpetual state of, “I'm on my guard. Something bad could happen at any moment. I got to be prepared to handle threat, okay? Gotta to be prepared to handle threat.” 

So if we know that humans brains and bodies work in such a way that we become aware of a threat and our body prepares to either fight or flee then we have to logically assume that correctional officers live in a pretty much perpetual state of fight or flight when they're at work and quite possibly when they're not at work. Because unfortunately, it's very hard to turn those things off in your brain and the same subconscious desire to not have the coffee table between yourself and the door at Aunt Sally's house. That's the same subconscious thing that's going to mean that you're forever pumping that adrenaline and that cortisol and that constant sense of, I got to be ready to either fight or flee.” It pervades your personal life too. That’s another whole episode. 

Corrections Officers lead a very unhealthy lifestyle and it's not their fault. I'm not talking about the ones who are drinking too much. I'm talking to not talking about the ones who are  engaging in other kinds of self medication or giving into anger control problems. I'm talking about just simply by virtue of where they spend their hours on the job. It makes them unhealthy. Their job is killing them. It's not okay, it's not okay friends.

(6:07)

Okay. So fight or flight. The specific thing that I want us to consider today is why we have so many movies and television shows that portray Corrections Officers as corrupt power-hungry bullies. Okay some of it is “it's just good drama,” I guess. But so are the hospital shows that have the doctor that is you know botching surgeries because he's not really able to perform surgery anymore because he has a drinking problem or whatever but he still wants the money and so he's doing… that makes for good drama but so do all the hospital shows about the doctors who are all heart and who are in a helping profession because they want to help and who are living sacrificially in order to make life better for others. So those stories grab us too. 

But prison stories, prison movies, prison TV shows… How often have you ever seen a prison movie that focused on a staff member who was just inspiring? Like we just, we don't, we don't really have that. And so I want us to kind of take a little time to consider this fight-or-flight thing and to consider how our brain and body chemistry as humans possibly sets up the corrections industry for a higher percentage of bullies than maybe we think is best. Okay? Now let me just make this very, very clear… I am not insinuating in any way that correctional officers are bullies. I am saying that there are some people working in Corrections who are there for the wrong reasons. And I think that any one who has worked in Corrections would probably be first in line to agree with me. You've seen it firsthand. You know that there are some people who should not be in this in career, right? They’re there for the wrong reasons. They're there because they like having power over someone else. They’re there because they like fighting. 

(8:26)

Okay, so that's what we're going to talk about. This is not a slam on correctional officers on the whole. There are a lot of them who are not at all wired as bullies. All right, but let's think about this fight-or-flight thing. If you live in a workplace, if you spend many, many, many hours in a workplace where you are under threat constantly and where your body is either telling you to get ready to fight or telling you to get ready to flee… Which kind of person is the most likely to stay in that career? The person whose brain is constantly saying, “you got to get ready to run away! You got to get ready to run away!” Or the person who's wiring is such that when they're threatened their brain is constantly saying, “you got to get ready to fight! You got to get ready to fight! You got to get ready to fight!”  

I think that if your personality is such and your wiring is such that when you get that adrenaline and cortisol response to threat and it comes across as flight not fight.  When you're first go-to response is “I want to run away,” I think you're hard pressed to stay in Corrections. I can't imagine the person with the fortitude to do it. I'm sure there are people doing it. There are people doing amazingly hard things that I can't imagine. But if your go-to is flight when you feel threatened, I think it's unlikely that you're going to stay in the field of Corrections. If however, your internal wiring and your personality are such that when you are threatened, you immediately get ready to fight you might very well stay in Corrections. That might feel powerful. That might feel like a place to be in control. That might feel like a place to dump undealt with aggression from other areas of your life. There could be any number of unhealthy responses to pain in our lives that cause us to want to break things, break people. 

And if experiencing some of that unresolved stuff, if that gets some degree of release when you're at work, because there are opportunities to fight, because there is threat, and because there is this thing in your brain saying, “that’s it, i'm not taking it and i'm just going to do what I gotta do. And I'll do it away from the cameras so I don't get disciplined for it or I'll only do it to a point so that I don't actually do injury to somebody and get disciplined for it.” Whatever the specifics might be. And again, I am really not talking about a lot of conscious decision making going on here. I'm talking about a very subconscious response to threat. But what I'm saying is, doesn't it seem likely that the majority of people who stay in Corrections are people who are not constantly feeling the desire to flee when there's a threat? It just kind of makes sense. Could that be why our movies and our TV, our stories about prison… imaginary stories… so often have bad guys wearing the correctional officer uniforms? It just, I don't know. It seems like it makes sense to me. 

(12:08)

So what's the solution? Well, you can't change people's internal wiring, right? I don't get to choose what my response to threat is when the adrenaline and cortisol start pumping because I am under threat. The way Sabrina is wired is to flee or to freeze… depending on how big the threat is. I'm not a fighter. It's just not me and that's not even really a choice that I've made. That is how I feel, how I respond when my brain picks up on a threat. So we can't change people and we can't remove all the fighters from a correctional officer uniforms either.

Because honestly, there's a time and a place where we need people who can stand up and who can step into the fray and who can stop violence before it goes any farther. I would be lousy at that so we don't need a whole bunch of Sabrina's wearing correctional officer uniforms, right? We can't change the people but we can recognize what the constant threat is doing in our system. And we can recognize that expecting staff to show up for 10, 12, 16 hour shifts in an environment that has them constantly on edge waiting for the next thing to explode. That expecting them to function in that workplace environment and offering them nothing that will help them handle that degree of threat and stress. Because friends there is little to nothing available in terms of mental health support, mental wellness resources, for Correctional staff.

There are people who seek help on their own. There is a   form of PTSD basically that is specific to the corrections industry and about 10 years ago, it was labeled Corrections fatigue. It's slightly different from the kind of PTSD that soldiers who have been in combat experience but it has a lot of similar symptoms. COs almost universally suffer from at least some degree of Corrections fatigue and it has them on edge, it has them feeling panicky, it has them struggling with sleep, it has them struggling with intrusive, negative, unpleasant thoughts or memories. You know, video that plays on loop in their head of really awful things that they've seen at work.  

And if this is an industry where that is the environment that the professionals are working in, isn't it the industry's responsibility to then provide healing resources for them? There should be counseling just routinely available as a benefit. That goes right along with your salary and your health insurance. You should also just have counseling because you are being damaged mentally and emotionally by your work environment if you work in Corrections. You just are. Not only is that not provided as a benefit, it is stigmatized. 

(15:50)

We know that there's a stigma against mental illness in society as a whole. We know that there is some degree of stigma, although it is lessening. I am very grateful to see that the trend moving in the right direction toward simply people acknowledging that they need help to maintain their mental health. Even if there is not a profound mental illness or a diagnosed mental illness at play. But within law enforcement in general and definitely within Corrections, there is an additional layer of stigma and it's tied to a number of things. First of all, it's tied to the fact that there’s staff shortage nationwide.  Prisons are running in some cases 16 to 30 percent understaffed. In some cases, 30 to 50%  understaffed. There are not enough people to be in charge and so no one feels safe, no one feels safe in their workplace. That reality is part of the stigma. Okay.

Your superiors and your colleagues have to feel like they can count on you to handle whatever comes up because you are likely to have to handle it by yourself. You are likely to not have a partner working alongside you to where the two of you can handle it together. You, you have to give off an air of being completely competent at all times. And if you can't maintain that air if you say, “Actually, I'm going through a lot right now and the whole incident that we had in the yard last week, it really kind of messed with my head and I'm not feeling solid right now and I need to talk to somebody… need to talk to a mental health professional.” Now you have supervisors looking at you going, “Okay so can I count on you to do your job today or not? Because if you're like not feeling it, does that mean there's going to be a riot in my facility because you're not, you're not quite yourself today?” You know. 

There’s a huge layer of stigma simply because of the staffing shortage and how much rests on an individual's shoulders for any given shift. Additionally, there is a layer of stigma that comes from the expectation to have somebody else's six. Okay, they talk about I got your six. That means I got your back. I'm not leaving you to go into this by yourself. So there's this, there’s this funny both/and going on. You're expected to be able to handle things on your own. You're expected to not need to ask for help and at the same time, the assumption is, “hey, all of us in this uniform, we’ve got each other's back. We are all in this together and we're brothers and sisters here. We're siblings. You know. Nobody's going to just abandon you to a horrible situation that happens.” Right? To a riot, to acts of violence, to a hostage situation. Whatever.

So now, there's also there's the supervisor stigma of looking and saying, “Can I count on you to just do what you're getting paid to do? Because I need you 100% on today.” There's also your colleagues looking at you saying, “Okay, if I radio for help like you've got my six, right? Guys, you can't just leave me in there. Like, I got to be able to count on you that I can call you when I need you.”

That's, that's a lot of pressure. It's a lot of pressure to pretend to be okay if you're not okay. So not only is counseling and Mental Health Resources an automatic benefit for people who work in Corrections, there is an extra deep layer of stigma that is specific to law enforcement and specific to the corrections industry that goes above and beyond the basic stigma that still exists in our society. When people say, “I'm actually not okay.”

(19:59)

So this whole fight-or-flight thing, and the whole need for correctional officers to have support for their mental and emotional health… It's got to be brought to the forefront. It has been kept quiet for so long. There's a wonderful organization called One Voice United. You can go to OneVoiceUnited.org to learn more about them but this is Corrections professionals who are coming together and saying we have to talk about this. Society has to know, lawmakers, policymakers, legislators, congress has to know what this career is doing to the people who work in it.  They have to know about the high suicide rate among correctional officers, they have to know about the high alcoholism rate among correctional officers, they have to know about the high divorce rate. They have to know about the life expectancy.

Do you know that the life expectancy in the US for    people not working in Corrections is 72 years old? Life expectancy for a correctional officer is 59. Do the math… 59 verses 72. That's not okay. We should not be taking years off of somebody's life because we need somebody to work in Corrections. If that is what the current model is doing to staff than it is our responsibility as a society outside the razor wire to look at it and to say, “Oh man, we're doing that to you? No, we don't have the right to do that to you. No, no, we have to find, we have to find a better way to do this. We can't just be taking years of your life.“ Okay.

(22:00)

So you're doing part of what needs to be done right now? Because you're listening to the PrisonCare podcast where we believe that everybody on the inside matters. And that what is going to make life better for incarcerated people inside a prison should not be done at the expense of the corrections staff nor should making life better for Corrections staff be done at the expense of the incarcerated individuals under their watch. But you are caring. You're caring enough to learn about this, you're caring enough to think about it, and I hope you're caring enough to talk about it with others. 

We need to be bringing these conversations out to the forefront before more people lose their lives, before more people live lives that are so much less than they should be because they're crippled by mental and emotional damage that’s done by the stress in this toxic workplace and by the lack of mental health resources that are provided for them and that are encouraged. 

I also encourage you to check out an organization called DesertWaters.com. Desert Waters is an organization that is dedicated to promoting the health of Corrections professionals and they provide mental wellness resources and counseling and they are working tirelessly to remove stigma within the corrections industry. So, there are people out there, there are Advocates that are beginning to push this conversation out into the light and to put it in front of policymakers. And I just want to encourage you to be a part of that by having these conversations, by talking to others about it. 

If you have a loved one who is incarcerated, if you are a penpal encourager, and you're in communication with people who are wearing the other kind of uniform, ask them if they've ever thought about it.

They live in a perpetual state of hyper vigilance too because they live in a prison. So they live in a perpetual state of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. They sense the threat all the time. They can't leave. And that's another whole episode right there. But they know what it feels like and it just might be that it has never occurred to them that the COs feel the same way. It just might humanize the cops that much more if a resident is encouraged to think about it and to recognize the othering has to stop inside prisons. We have to encourage are incarcerated friends and loved ones to recognize the staff as humans and individuals and to have respect for them just as they learn to respect themselves. We can do this. We can encourage the conversation, both outside the razor wire and inside. We can support positive prison culture because everyone on the inside matters. 

If you'd like to learn more, if you'd like to find out how you can support our work in particular on University campuses, as we reach out to the people who will be the policymakers in the next decade; the criminal justice professionals, the sociology professionals that that whole field of study among undergraduates and graduate students on universities. These are the folks who are going to be making the new model in our prison system, in just the next few years. And PrisonCare is committed to being a part of laying a good foundation for them, helping them come into their field out of their years in college and into their field already thinking of a prison as a neighborhood, already recognizing the US versus them serves no one well, already recognizing that Dynamic security and normalization these are the ways forward because they humanize individuals, which opens the door for rehabilitation, for redemption, for restoration, for restitution, for all those good things, all those things that we as a society need from our correction system. So you can learn about ways to become involved in supporting that work as well. And keep listening to the PrisonCare podcast where we're going to keep digging into these things and opening up the conversation. Thanks for being here and thanks for caring.        

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Thanks for listening to The PrisonCare Podcast. Be sure to visit us at prisoncare.org.

PrisonCare: equipping compassionate people to support positive prison culture from the outside, because everyone on the inside matters.

http://prisoncare.org/community.html

Learn more about PrisonCare, Inc. and donate to our work

Time Markers:

(0:58) Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn

(3:02) Backs to the Wall

(6:07) In the Movies

(8:26) Wired to Fight

(12:08) Correction’s Counseling

(15:50) Mental Health Stigma is Everywhere

(19:59) A Significant Drop in Life Expectancy

(22:00) Are You Having These Conversations?

 
 Intro/Outro MUSIC CREDIT:
 We've Come A Long Way (No Vocal Version)
 Exzel Music Publishing (freemusicpublicdomain.com)
 Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/