Corrections Professionals

Corrections professionals: facility staff, probation and parole officers, case managers, and administrators. Stand at a turning point in young people’s lives. Most youth in custody carry long histories of trauma, abuse, neglect, racism, and unmet mental-health needs. What happens in correctional settings can either deepen that harm or begin to repair it.

Recognize Trauma as the Core Issue

Most incarcerated youth have experienced multiple adversities long before their first arrest, including abuse, neglect, violence, family separation, and systemic racism. Behaviors like aggression and rule-breaking often reflect survival strategies and dysregulated stress responses rather than simple “bad choices.” Training all staff in trauma science, ACEs, adolescent brain development, and the impacts of racism and poverty helps shift the lens from “what’s wrong with you?” to “what happened to you, and what do you need?”

• Build Relationship-Centered, Trauma-Informed Facilities

Youth heal in the context of safe, stable relationships. Prioritize consistent staff assignments, mentoring, small group work, and one-to-one case management grounded in trust and respect, supported by predictable routines, clear rules, and fair, non-humiliating responses to misbehavior. Solitary confinement, prolonged isolation, and heavy restraint use damage mental health and heighten self-harm risk; they should be replaced with de-escalation techniques, sensory or calming spaces, and supervised “time-away” that maintains connection.

Integrate Restorative and Family-Based Practices

Restorative justice circles and conferences allow youth to understand harm, express remorse, and participate in making amends, reducing re-offending more effectively than punishment alone. When victims and youth participate voluntarily with skilled facilitation, both can experience validation and some measure of closure. Keeping families(birth, foster, or kin) engaged through visits, joint planning, and family sessions strengthens the support network youth will rely on after release.

Provide Comprehensive Mental Health and Skill-Building Services

Many correctional settings function as de facto mental-health facilities for youth who never received adequate care. Employing or partnering with trauma-informed therapists, counselors, and psychiatrists enables treatment of complex trauma, grief, and attachment wounds, with regular screening and rapid response for suicidality and self-harm. Make psychotropic medications a part of carefully reviewed treatment plans that always include therapy and independent review, not stand-alone tools for controlling behavior, while strong education, vocational training, and life-skills programs restore competence and hope.

End Harmful Practices and “Adultification”

Treating youth like “small adults”, including sentencing them as adults or subjecting them to adult prison conditions: increases abuse, suicide, and chronic criminal involvement. Support ending transfers of children to adult prisons, banning solitary confinement for minors, limiting force, and adopting developmentally appropriate standards for care, discipline, and programming. Daily practice should reflect that adolescence is a period of rapid brain development and high capacity for change.

Invest in Staff Support, Training, and Leadership

Working daily with traumatized youth exposes staff to secondary trauma, moral stress, and burnout. Facilities that offer regular debriefings, mental-health resources, peer support, reflective supervision, and clear career pathways see safer environments and lower turnover. Leadership sets culture: when supervisors model trauma-informed, respectful interactions, back staff who choose de-escalation over force, and hold everyone to clear standards, corrections culture can shift from mere containment to care plus accountability.

Engage in Policy Reform and Community Partnerships

Advocate for policies that align with what works: limiting detention, ending juvenile life without parole, requiring trauma training and public outcome reporting, and funding strong reentry supports. Partnerships with community-based programs: violence-interruption projects, restorative boards, youth employment initiatives, and healing-focused group homes, create off-ramps from incarceration and help youth sustain prosocial ties.

Measure Outcomes and Elevate Youth Voice

Track meaningful outcomes after release: new offenses, returns to custody, school enrollment and completion, employment, mental-health status, and family stability, disaggregated by race, gender, disability, and geography. Internally, youth councils and advisory groups can provide feedback on safety, programming, and daily life, while peer mentoring programs let more experienced youth support newcomers. Taking youth perspectives seriously improves conditions and builds leadership skills.

More Punishment and Confinement or a Path to Healing and Hope

Extra Steps

Recognizing how many traumatized children through no fault of their own wind up in the justice system as children and juveniles and graduate and stay there for entire lifetimes to become part of the 80% experiencing recidivism at 9 years motivates some of us to stand and speak out for them.

Minnesota’s former Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz has remarked that 80% of the youth in Juvenile Justice have come through Child Protective Services.

Youth corrections sits at one of the most dangerous and potentially transformative points in a young person’s life. Every interaction(in a hallway, classroom, group room, or cell) can either reinforce a story of worthlessness and danger or begin a new story of value, safety, and possibility. Shifting from punishment and fear to healing, accountability, and support is not “soft on crime”; it is a smarter, safer approach to public protection.

When corrections professionals see themselves as healers, mentors, and guardians of future adults(and when systems back them with training, resources, and policy) youth facilities can interrupt cycles of harm instead of deepening them, making communities safer for everyone.

Extra Steps: In your work, you are surrounded by people whose lives have been shaped by trauma, including childhood abuse and neglect, and who mostly have never received effective treatment. Prison staff can make conditions safer and more humane by using small, repeatable actions that fit inside their existing roles, even in harsh, underfunded facilities. These actions will not fix the system alone, but they can reduce harm, support rehabilitation, and protect staff and incarcerated people.

Everyday interactions

• Use name, not number, and basic respect (eye contact, calm tone), which reduces tension, grievances, and assaults.
• De-escalate first by giving clear directions, choices when possible, and a few extra seconds before using force or write-ups.
• Notice changes in behavior (withdrawal, agitation, talk of “not caring”) and flag them as possible distress or suicide risk instead of “disrespect.”

Trauma and mental health

• Treat disclosures about past abuse or current family violence as important information: document clearly and route to mental health or case management the same day.
• When you see heavy reliance on psychotropic medications without visible support, note patterns (e.g., “he sleeps all day, misses calls with his kids”) and share with clinical staff instead of ignoring it.
• Encourage and normalize use of groups, therapy, or chaplaincy by framing them as strength, not weakness, when talking with inmates.

Protecting families and children

• During phone calls or visits, if you overhear credible talk of harming a child or a partner, follow your reporting policy instead of treating it as “just venting.”
• Support safer visitation by enforcing basic boundaries consistently (no threats, no shaming kids, no obvious intoxication), and quietly backing caregivers who try to set healthy limits with incarcerated parents.
• When inmates talk about parenting, redirect conversations toward non-violent discipline and staying involved through letters, reading, or schoolwork instead of control through fear.

Small advocacy inside the system

• Use incident reports and email to document patterns: repeated self-harm attempts, a housing unit that feels out of control, or chronic understaffing that endangers people.
• Speak up in briefings about practical changes that reduce harm: like more consistent dayroom schedules, clearer communication about lockdowns, or safer ways to distribute meds on chaotic units.
• Participate in or request training on de-escalation, suicide prevention, and trauma-informed practice, and encourage colleagues to take it seriously.

Caring for staff well-being

• Use peer support, EAP, or informal check-ins to talk about critical incidents so trauma does not just get buried and acted out on the tier.
• Set personal lines you will not cross (unnecessary humiliation, “goading” someone into a reaction) and hold to them, even under peer pressure.
• When possible, rotate away from the most toxic posts, take leave after major incidents, and model asking for help so newer staff see that as normal, not weakness.

Stories and Lessons from the Field

Corrections professionals who work with youth describe how a trauma lens can change both outcomes and the culture of a facility. In one national portrait of youth detention, staff reported that after trauma-informed training they began doing small but powerful things differently: like knocking before entering a young person’s room and coaching youth through breathing exercises when tensions rose, which reduced outbursts and made the environment feel safer for both staff and residents.

A prison officer who had witnessed numerous fights, assaults, and deaths later realized he was living with unaddressed PTSD from years on the job and found that when his agency began talking openly about secondary trauma and offering counseling, colleagues were more willing to seek help instead of just “toughing it out” until burnout or crisis.

Research on trauma-informed juvenile justice shows that when facilities adopt frameworks like TARGET or the Sanctuary Model: teaching youth about how trauma affects the brain, helping them build regulation and coping skills, and training all staff in trauma-informed practices. There are fewer disciplinary infractions, better staff retention, and more young people leaving custody with tools for healing rather than deeper wounds.

Next Steps

Here are national resources especially useful for corrections professionals (facility leaders, custody staff, probation/parole, and reentry providers) building trauma-informed practices, with links embedded as requested.

• The National Reentry Resource Center brief Trauma-Informed Practices for Reentry Providers explains the prevalence of trauma among people leaving custody and offers concrete steps for trauma-informed reentry case management and supervision.
• The Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority report Trauma-Informed and Evidence-Based Practices and Programs to Address Trauma in Correctional Settings reviews trauma prevalence in jails/prisons and describes evidence-based models such as Seeking Safety, TARGET, TREM, and Sanctuary that can be adapted for correctional environments.
• The article Creating Trauma-Informed Correctional Care: A Balance of Goals and Environment defines trauma-informed correctional care (TICC), outlines key principles (safety, de-escalation, staff-inmate relationships), and shows how TICC improves safety, reduces incidents, and supports rehabilitation.
• The National Institute of Corrections series Becoming Trauma Informed: An Essential Element for Justice Settings provides webinars and tools to help jails, prisons, and community corrections understand trauma and integrate trauma-informed practices into daily operations.
• The NIC/BJA guide Using Trauma-Informed Practices to Enhance Safety and Security in Women’s Correctional Facilities (and its summary Using Trauma-Informed Practices to Enhance Safety and Security) show how trauma-informed changes in policy, searches, and interactions can reduce infractions and improve safety for both staff and women in custody.
• SAMHSA’s Trauma Training for Criminal Justice Professionals (via the GAINS Center) offers curricula like “How Being Trauma-Informed Improves Criminal Justice System Responses,” which are widely used for training correctional officers, probation staff, and court personnel.
• The R Street commentary Trauma-Informed Corrections: Part Four of a Four-Part Series summarizes the rationale for trauma-informed corrections and outlines key operational shifts: recognizing trauma, changing policies and physical spaces, and actively avoiding re-traumatization.
• The Trauma-Informed Corrections chapter from the Center for Gender & Justice explains trauma’s prevalence among justice-involved people, gender-responsive considerations, and concrete system-level changes for correctional agencies.
• The NCTSN training Think Trauma: A Training for Working with Justice-Involved Youth gives juvenile facility and probation staff a four-module curriculum on trauma and delinquency, impact on development, coping, and vicarious trauma among staff.
• The overview Trauma-Informed Care: The Importance of Understanding the Impact of Trauma in Corrections reviews evidence supporting trauma-informed care as a “universal precaution” in corrections and discusses benefits for institutional safety, staff wellbeing, and recidivism reduction.

References

• Pew Charitable Trusts – juvenile justice reform and therapeutic facility models
• Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center (Wisconsin) – evaluation reports on intensive treatment and reduced recidivism
• The Sentencing Project – research on juvenile life without parole and youth sentencing
• Annie E. Casey Foundation – “Transforming Juvenile Justice” and youth facility reform
• U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention – data and program evaluations
• National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges – resources on trauma-informed and restorative practices
• Harvard Center on the Developing Child – toxic stress, adolescent brain development, and resilience
• Safe Passage for Children of Minnesota – case studies on youth justice and system failures
• National Child Traumatic Stress Network – guidelines on trauma-informed juvenile justice