Prison staff in England are increasingly missing work due to poor mental health, exclusive data shows. Officers say a lack of support, regular traumatic incidents and violence are factors behind the rise.<\/b><\/p>\n
“In my final weeks, it was very common to come in and see one of your colleagues’ names crossed off the rota because they had got to a point where working one more minute at the prison was just mentally impossible.”<\/p>\n
Until last month, Sophie, 22, was a prison officer at HMP Guys Marsh in Dorset. It was a job she had once “loved”.<\/p>\n
“When you saw the prisoners making progress, it was just incredible,” she said. “But I had to leave because the prison never supported staff through the hard times.”<\/p>\n
While working at Guys Marsh, Sophie needed hospital psychiatric care. She said her job\u202fhad been the principal factor in the decline in her mental health.<\/p>\n
“Dealing with constant and disgusting levels of self-harm and assaults with no real support meant I just couldn’t do it anymore,” she said. “I begged for help but got nothing.”<\/p>\n
A Ministry for Justice spokesperson said the government had “inherited a prison system in crisis”. <\/p>\n
They added the government was tackling “unacceptable” levels of violence, self-harm and assaults through additional prison places and sentencing reforms “so our jails create better citizens, not better criminals”.<\/p>\n
England’s prisons lost almost 150,000 working days because of mental ill-health last year, up 44% since 2019.<\/p>\n
Guys Marsh, where Sophie worked, had the highest proportion of prison officers taking at least one day off for mental health reasons last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prison staff in England are increasingly missing work due to poor mental health, exclusive data shows. Officers say…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":619512,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4317],"tags":[105,218,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-619511","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/619512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}