I have had some experience with corrections. In our programs, we invite first responders to join, so there may be one or two first responders, and sometimes a corrections officer joins us.
A corrections officer is just like responders in the police or ambulance or fire. Their context is different, so the way the trauma affects them depends on the context they're in.
As my colleague stated for veterans, they're like a blunt instrument. They'll go into a situation and experience something that's horrific and traumatic. They'll do it with buddies, and they'll leave with buddies. That often is a buffer to their experience, because they're a part of a strong community or a pack, where they have strength.
Police officers, though, are a bit different, because they're walking the streets every day and using social engagement as a means of crowd control. They're constantly scanning their environment and looking for a perceived threat, and when they see it, they're actually withholding a blunt instrument response. They're going for something more nuanced. They're using their social skills to try to play down an incident or to keep an incident from erupting into something violent. When it goes violent, it goes violent very quickly, and they then need to jump into a fight-or-flight or an active role of aggression to be able to match the aggression and to be able to restrain or to control the situation.
For firefighters, the context is different. In the same way, for the folks who work in our prison systems, their context is different, whereby that becomes, really, the place where they're living. They can experience things such as inmates who are self-mutilating, slowly trying to take their lives, and trying to torment the guards as they do it. They have to experience that daily and try to provide a measure of care for those individuals as they deliberately try to psychologically injure them.