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The Prison Officer Podcast
The Prison Officer Podcast is a place where prison officers and correctional staff share their experiences, discuss leadership, cope with stress, and learn survival strategies for one of the toughest careers out there. Hosted by Michael Cantrell, this podcast delves into the lives, dreams, and challenges faced by those who work inside the walls of our nation’s prisons. It features interviews, insights, and discussions related to the unique and demanding world of corrections. Whether it’s overcoming difficult leaders, understanding rehabilitation, or addressing misconceptions about incarcerated populations, the Prison Officer Podcast provides valuable perspectives from professionals in the field.
The Prison Officer Podcast
Re-Broadcast - The Silence Crisis in Corrections w/Michael Cantrell - Independent Voter Podcast
This is a Re-Broadcast of The Silence Crisis in Corrections with Michael Cantrell from The Independent Voter Podcast -
Think the justice system only affects the incarcerated? Think again. In this episode of the How It Really Works series of the Independent Voter Podcast, Chad Peace sits down with corrections expert Michael Cantrell to unpack the hidden mental health crisis facing correctional officers across the country.
Cantrell, a former officer and host of the Prison Officer Podcast, reveals how burnout, PTSD, and emotional isolation have become normalized in a profession that rarely makes the headlines. From training culture to administrative neglect, this conversation peels back the layers on a system that’s breaking the very people we expect to hold it together.
This episode is a must-listen for anyone serious about justice reform—and it’s just one chapter in a much bigger story.
Chad Peace chad@ivc.media
Contact us: mike@theprisonofficer.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ThePrisonOfficer
Take care of each other and Be Safe behind those walls and fences!
O-Lost Media. Welcome to the Independent Voter Podcast. From Independent Voter Project. We're going to expand a little bit a new era of independent voter news that the journalists just don't cover. It's where we have these debates on a national level, really taking on issues so that people have more educated disagreements with each other educated disagreements with each other. Let's just explain how the process really works. Welcome back to the Independent Voter Project, where we try to unpack some of the complexities that often get oversimplified in our public policy discussion.
Speaker 1:This podcast is part of our how it Really Works series. We're talking in this series about health care behind bars, and today we're going to focus on really the health care and the life behind bars of correctional officers, the people we expect to take care of the prison system and are the caretakers behind bars but are facing a mental health trauma, burnout and some serious issues that really don't just go under-discussed. They go undiscussed in our public policy conversation, and with that I'm bringing on our special guest, michael Contro. Mike, I want to thank you for your work first of all, and thank you for being here. As I think we've heard, the job of a correctional officer is both dangerous and emotionally isolating and deeply misunderstood. I want you to thank you for coming here, educating us and the work that you continue to do for others and getting them prepared to be correctional officers and improve as correctional officers.
Speaker 1:So my guest today, michael Cantrell, has a life served behind bars, not because he did anything wrong, but because he wanted to, you know, serve the public. And from that perspective, you know, and now retired, has his own podcast, has written several books, has been a mentor for folks who want to get into the correctional officer system. But we brought him on to talk about some of the realities, some of it good, some of it bad. Right, it's a reality that you know if you're going to have a prison system and you're going to contain some of the bad things that go on in society, you have to have public servants there that are going to oversee and be the caretakers for the whole, the entire system. So you know, with that, michael, why don't you introduce yourself? Give a little bit of your background and your credentials in speaking to this important issue?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. My name is Michael Cantrell. I started in corrections in 1992. And to tell you how old I am, the place I started is now a museum so you can go visit it if you want. I started at Missouri State Pen. I spent about nine years with the Missouri Department of Corrections. I had the opportunity to go to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. I'd spend the next 21 and a half years there, multiple penitentiaries, multiple areas and retired out of Washington DC as the chief of the Office of Emergency Preparedness. Since then, like you said, I have a podcast. I've written a couple of books and I still teach for a couple of companies. So I still get to see correctional officers and law enforcement every week for command presence or pepper ball, which are the two companies, the main companies I teach for. So I'm still out there. I'm still. I say I retired, but I also say I'm failing retirement horribly.
Speaker 1:Well. So I guess on that point you're failing. Why are you failing retirement? Why are you doing this right? You know you got your wife, you got your nice. I believe you got a nice. You know nice farm and animals and all that stuff.
Speaker 2:So why are you failing so bad at retiring? Because there's such a need. There's such a need out there for corrections is just hungry for good training. I know that the public perception is that we get as much training as law enforcement officers. That's an absolute fallacy. Some correctional officers get as little as a week or two training before they get thrown inside working and then getting into good quality training after that is tough, because the money that we spend in prisons a large portion of it is salaries. Absolutely Any budget that you look at, that's going to be it, but the rest of it goes to the inmate needs.
Speaker 2:Training is always overlooked and it's the thing they need the most. You know, today they're talking about retention, recruitment. I believe that the reason we don't have good retention is because our staff don't feel like they're trained. They don't feel like they're knowledgeable. They don't feel like they're safe when they're inside. Somebody who's confident and has the tools to do something can face almost anything, but if you're having to wonder whether or not I can do this, or you know if I should do this, you're going to be hesitant when the time comes. So I love getting out there. I love seeing these people amazing people work hidden behind those walls and fences, and not only our prisons, but our jails, our detention centers, private prisons. It's not just what some people think you know as a state prison. There's a whole bunch of people who are out there working.
Speaker 1:And I mean, when we set out to do this episode, we knew there was a lot of you know issues that were uncovered and we didn't know exactly. You know everything that we were, you know, going to write about until we did the research. One of the things we found, for example, in California I know you know you're out in Missouri, but in California we spend $4 billion on health care, right, and we know that nationally, like, there's a constitutional standard, we have to provide adequate health care for prisoners and stuff. And so I'm going back to your point. Right, you have correctional officers that come into the system, come, sometimes getting two, three weeks training, and we think, okay, well, training on how to, you know, maintain the prison population, keep them under control. But you know, what is your experience been with? Like OK, or a medic, but has to deal with the realities of day-to-day taking care of the health of the prison population.
Speaker 2:Sure, and that is part of what we do. I mean, that's part of our charge. We do it at a level. Some people have never had the level of healthcare they get once they go into prison. But one thing I want to make note of before I talk more about that is that the public perception of prison is what they get out of TV and media.
Speaker 2:There's many different levels of inmates. Okay, you've got inmates down here that have done something wrong. They made a mistake, they're going to be back out. They need, you know, they need skills, they need stuff like that so that they can become productive. You've got another level of inmate who is never going to be productive in society. They don't want to draw Social Security, they don't want retirement, they want to live this thug life that they've built and that they've grown up around or whatever, and they're never going to come back into society the way a lot of the public thinks. So Inside all that, we've got multiple levels.
Speaker 2:We've got a huge amount of mental health inmates, because we have no place to put our mental health in this prison or in this country. They're either in our hospitals or they're in our prisons. The other thing we have is most of the people who live this hard lifestyle have ruined their bodies, and I spent 14 years at the Federal Medical Center in Springfield, missouri, and you know you've got Hells Angels bikers who are now missing two legs. You know they may not be as physically as much of a problem, but they still are violent, they still are criminal, they still have a criminal mindset.
Speaker 2:Another thing that people don't realize about the Federal Medical Center is how big the dialysis unit is. The number of people who've ruined their livers and kidneys by the time we get them and this is a huge cost to the United States is to keep these people not only incarcerated, which is a certain level of money that we spend. You talked about California. The Federal Bureau of Prisons spends eight. Their last budget was 8.3 billion for fewer inmates. So you've got these guys who have these medical issues, and then, on top of that, we have to provide the security, because they're also criminal, and so that's a thing that they don't ever show on TV.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, that's just some of the misconceptions of the prisoners themselves, right and like, even so, that there's a lot of misconceptions to break up there. And when you're talking directly about the prisoners, but going back to the correctional officers themselves, what do you find is the biggest misconception? I mean, you live, right, you lived your life as a correctional officer, right, you can, you know, you have the reputation out there of who a correctional officer is. So I guess, from your perspective somebody who's lived it what is the biggest misconception and one misconception you'd like to clear up?
Speaker 2:Well, I've mentioned this before but it's such a good analogy. There is no one correctional officer, just like there's no one inmate. People ask me well, movie and TV, what's the most like real life? And I always go to Green Mile, even though that's a fantasy movie if you look at the main officers in there. Tom Hanks, that good, solid guy, comes to work every day, does his job the way he's supposed to, he cares about people. You got the big guy bull behind him. You know he's the good, strong guy, but he keeps his mouth shut and he only deals with stuff when he has to. You got the old man who's worried about retirement and policy right, and then they show the rookie. And the rookie in that movie is portrayed brilliantly because he's always looking up to the other three, seeing what they do and how they've made it through this career. And then, off to the side, you have Percy. And yes, we do have Percy's, but we're judged by this couple of percent of staff who are Percy's. And I don't care whether you're a lawyer, a doctor, a nurse, whatever you are, all of you have that type of employee there.
Speaker 2:The problem is when. When that type of employee screws up in my job. People get hurt, people escape people uh, you know, get excessive use of force, that type of stuff. Uh, it's not most of us, it's just a couple of us. The rest of the people in here are the coaches. They're at your church, they're you know, they're great leaders. We learn leadership inside our prisons because we lead people. So when we go out in the community we're often the t-ball coach, we're often leading, you know, the church study on Sunday. We're doing that kind of stuff because we're the leaders, not only inside, but we're the leaders in the community. But we don't talk about it because people have this twisted view of what I do inside that I walk in there with a baseball bat and just start whacking people.
Speaker 1:Right. The public, at least what I've grown up, you know watching TV and you know you see shows like Locked Up or that and like that's that's the average person's exposure to it. Right Is kind of this rough edge. One of the things that just blew my mind in doing this research was a was a statistic that came out that almost 30 percent of correctional officers are suffering from something really close to PTSD, if not PTSD Right, which is at a level of combat veterans and everything. So how, knowing that correctional is right their moms, their dads, their brothers, their sisters, their t-ball coaches right and then you go and you look at a stat like that from someone who lived their life in the system. You know what is your take on that. How do we deal with it? What does the public need to know, because that's a crisis level, and what do we have to do to deal with a crisis like that?
Speaker 2:Sure, and there's different levels of PTSD. What we tend to see in corrections now there could be a riot, there could be that incident that causes PTSD. But it's the cumulative PTSD. It's the day in and day out manipulation. It's the day in and day out violence. It's the day in and day out self-mutilation that we see amongst the inmates.
Speaker 2:It's that type of stuff that make those little mind scars that over a career you know you have developed not only this, this, um, how it's? You don't look at the human race like you did 30 years ago. Right, you've been. You've had people try to manipulate you every single day of your career. You've had people try to manipulate you every single day of your career. You've had people violent in front of you most of your career. So you become very tough. You push people away and we get to where we don't trust people because we're manipulated so much. That was the hardest thing for me. The violence I could handle, that didn't bother me as much, but the the constant manipulation to where you couldn't trust anybody. And then you end up looking around and and and you don't trust the people that are outside and the people that are around you and you start hanging out with just the people that you know.
Speaker 2:Um, one of the things I talk about in my classes. You know, when we're inside and you get involved in the use of force, you're on the bottom of that pile and you hit your body alarm. Here comes these 12 other officers and the sound of running boots is just, I mean, it's unbelievable. They're there to rescue you. It's a level of love that most people don't ever get to experience, because they're there to rescue you and this will happen many times during a career. And then you get outside and you go home and your wife has saved supper in the refrigerator and that level of love doesn't seem the same. You know, it's not as strong, it's not as immediate and it distorts our reality, because most people would look at that and go, oh wow, she thought about me, she took care of you know, made sure I had something to eat when I got home. But for us, we get this. You know it's just twisted view of love, of people, of trust, and the main thing we can do is talk about it Quit. You know every agency and some people aren't going to like that I say this, but every agency has an employee assistance program For most people, for most officers, that's being ran by how do I say this nicely by a psychologist who has no idea what we go through.
Speaker 2:She's not in the trenches with us. They're not in the T whatever. They're not in the trenches with us. They don't understand it. They want to talk pretty and expect us to fall into that. Well, that doesn't work for us. We don't see pretty the same way other people do. I don't get to go home at 5 o'clock. I've worked for 16 hour shifts in a row. Twice in my career. I worked more than 24 hours in a row. And you're in a place where your situational awareness has to be um, you know here, and you can't see anything in front of you except for the Mountain Dew that's trying to keep you awake and uh, so it's just. It's a whole messed up world. It's not normal and we live in there.
Speaker 1:We exist in there and we make it somehow. Well, yet you're an advocate for correctional officers and helping folks become correctional officers, right? So there's got to be something that draws you to it. So you know what. What is it that keeps drawing you to it and what are the types of things that you're looking at in order to fix? You know some of those problems, like you know, we we saw 63 percent, based on one study Don't even they don't. They don't seek the services that are provided to them. You know, for one reason or other, maybe they perceive the psychiatrist is going to be out of touch with them, maybe it's another reason, but you know what is it that draws you into it? Try to improve the system and how do you see addressing some of those problems? Like you know, you got serious mental health issues, but maybe we either don't, officers don't take it, or you know it's, it's just not adequate, right?
Speaker 2:Everybody's got their own opinion. I did. I spent some time talking to a professor who did some study on this and they asked me what I thought about it and what I saw. I'm a leader inside there. I'm trying to get through the day. I'm trying to promote, I'm trying to become a lieutenant or a captain or whatever.
Speaker 2:The minute I go into EAP people start looking at you like well, if you can't take care of your life at home, how are you going to be in charge here when the shit hits the fan? And so we avoid it. I'm not going to put myself in a position in front of other staff or inmates to, because in our job that's taken advantage of. Um, if we show a weakness, if there's a chink in the armor, somebody will stick a knife right in that chink, you know. So you can't ever let your armor down. And until we move some of this outside of work, where it's not being seen, where confidentiality actually happens, which in the agencies, I've seen that has caused a lot of problems because people go look for help and then other people find out and that's not the way it's is. Just encourage these guys and get them some actual training.
Speaker 2:There's another guy out there. You might reach out to William Young. He's out in Nebraska and he does a lot with officer wellness and check out his stuff. He says that we're trained to be the way we are from the time we walk in the academy and there's a lot of truth to that. You know you're propped up to that. You know you're you're propped up to be this person here. You know, and you you can't ever let that down and we're not trained how to let that down. We're trained to deescalate everybody else. We're trained to calm and uh, you know, minimize violence inside the prison, but nobody teaches us how to do that inside ourselves. Nobody teaches us how to deal with these feelings that that come up every day lack of trust, that type of stuff.
Speaker 1:So so it's hard to understand for somebody like myself, a regular person on the street. Right, we never go into the kind of that high stress environment, but you know, but in listening to one of your shows you had a guest on though that was talking about like visiting Belize, right, yeah, and we know that there's some programs where you have officers going to countries like Norway and Germany and stuff like that. So one of the things I want to question okay, you have this environment, this is what we're taught here. Right, we have this system we've set up here in the States, that's, you know how we, how we do things here. So can you just kind of give you a sense of like, well, what are these things going on to Belize? Do you think that some of the things you learn there can be applied here? You know, how? How does that fit into the conversation of what's going on behind the scenes of people like yourself, you know, going outside of the United States to take a look at how other people are doing things?
Speaker 2:Yeah, jared Sadulsky who was on there, and it's an amazing story down there and I think when you dig into that, what you find is a lot of caring, a lot of religion. You know not only that they do TED talks over the speakers for the inmates, but they keep the inmates engaged all day long in self-improvement. Now here's what, once again, where we have to and this is what our country is so bad about when we have these conversations down there, you have inmates who are mostly drugs okay, and they are trying to find ways for them to rehabilitate, to stay out, to have another life besides drugs, because once you get in there, it's just self, you know, it just builds on itself. Those are one sort of inmates. The other sort of inmates are the violent inmates who don't want to rehabilitate, and we keep getting those mixed up when we have those discussions about what's going on in Belize. Those are inmates who have nothing. So if you give them something, even if it's a little hope, even if it's a skill, they're more willing to grab a hold of it. If you go over to the Norway model, which I love, everybody throws this out.
Speaker 2:The last director of the Bureau of Prisons was big about talking about the Norway model. I challenge anybody to bring 50 Norwegian correctional officers over here and let them run our prison, because I'll go sit in their prison all day long. They don't have the level of inmates we have. They don't have the history of violence that we have in this country and you can look, our country was founded on violence. We're just a violent people. We're not going to sit down and do art projects in an apartment when we go to prison. It's just not going to happen.
Speaker 2:These are people who have been raised up, some of them in some of the most horrible conditions and inner cities, been in gangs. I've talked to them. We've been in gangs since they were seven, eight years old, and now you expect them to do an art project here. Let me make a potholder. That doesn't work for some of the inmates we've got, and we've got to split up this discussion about inmates. We've got violent inmates who need to be managed one way, and then we've got inmates who are going to be our neighbors and need to be managed another way.
Speaker 1:Well, I think you get to the core of why we want to do series like this and start advancing the conversation right and to our listeners, I think, who appreciate the stories and the coverage we've done in other areas, is like you see this narrative and then okay, okay, suddenly it comes out in the public. It's like, oh, we've been doing it all wrong, we should do what norway does right. Or you say, oh, this is this right and like that's the point, is like nothing. So the the reality, everything's a lot more.
Speaker 1:It's not as black and white, right and and sure, there may be things we can learn, but, just like you know a lot of the things ivpPs covered, election reform is different from state to state, locality to locality because of the circumstances, correctional, you know prison reform and you know things related to correctional officers and the prisoners are going to be fundamentally different.
Speaker 1:You know in California, missouri, belize and Norway different. You know in California, missouri, belize and Norway, and so, but what are the? You know? Is there something that we can take away that can help advance the public policy conversation about prison reform? If there was something that was like, hey, I wish people understood maybe you already covered it, but something I really wish people understood that. So, whether it's a legislator going into a hearing about, you know, the next correctional officer bill or union contract or whatever it is that, hey, if I could fix the misconception here, right, whatever other misconceptions still exist, this would help advance our goals of good policy that has nothing to do with partisanship, has nothing to do with anything other than having improving society outside and inside the walls of prison.
Speaker 2:Sure, let me start with. There's two sides to it. One is fixing what's going on with correctional officers, and COVID and short staffing did do one of those, which is it brought up pay, and our pay has come up in many areas which was needed. The thing that hasn't increased is training. You've got to give these officers the skills and I'm talking not just leadership training. There's a difference between hard skills and soft skills, right, and the hard skills, which is firearms, which is less lethal, that type of stuff. We train them at that. What we don't train them on is soft skills, and I'll talk, before we get done, about a book I've just it'll come out next week called power skills. And this is what I believe, because we need to be able to have staff who can talk to inmates, who can deescalate to inmates who can deescalate, who can self-regulate their own emotions, who are empathetic and can have appropriate relationships, because we do have a relationship with inmates on the inside. Now, people will see that word and they go oh my God, but it's like having a relationship with anybody else at work. Here's the line, here's what we can do, here's how I can help you, and so we have that. We need to teach those social skills. We need to teach EQ to those officers. We need to give them the little tips and tricks and things that it takes to be able to communicate, because it was tough for me. I came from the country and I got thrown in a prison full of gang members from downtown St Louis and Kansas City. We didn't immediately speak their same language right, so I had to learn all that. I had to learn that stuff On the other side. I'll tell you what I've seen. That has worked and I think it needs to be expanded. I worked at a place called Ozark Correctional Center. It turned into a drug treatment camp, but it was a work camp and they would bring those inmates in. They only had a couple of years left in their sentence. Every day we'd take them out and they worked at Tyson Foods, rainbow Paint Company, all these places with people, the regular people in the society. They got paid the same as those guys did. A quarter of that went to the victim's fund for the society. They got paid the same as those guys did. A quarter of that went to the victim's fund for the state. A quarter of it went to what they called housing and busing, which was paid for the guy that took them to work. A quarter of it went on a commissary account and a quarter of it went in a savings account.
Speaker 2:Now let me tell you, when I worked at Missouri State Pen, I saw them take a guy who had 30 years in, walk him out the front door. He's released and they gave him a check for $3.45 and said don't come back. What do you think's going to happen there? They didn't give him any skills. He doesn't have any money. He's going to go back to what he knows when.
Speaker 2:At Ozark Correctional Center I saw these guys who they would go out of there with $15,000, $20,000. And this was 20 years ago that they had saved up over a couple of years. You can buy a small car. You can pay the first month's water deposit. You can pay first and last month's rent. You can move to a different neighborhood. You don't have to go live in your mom's house where all your buddies that got you into drugs still live.
Speaker 2:Those were the things that I saw work. Those guys didn't come back. Some of them went back to work at the same company on Monday as a supervisor. We'd let them out on Friday and they'd hire them back. They were such good workers. So there's stuff like that out there all across the country.
Speaker 2:It's not just what I saw in Missouri. You give them an opportunity, a true opportunity. You know it's not enough to say here's how you fill out a check, here's what a checkbook would look like If you ain't got no money. You know it doesn't help. So give them the opportunities. Put them back to work is one of the things that this country needs, because I absolutely hate seeing the level of money that we spend for people to sit inside cells. And I know there's this whole argument about well, it's slave labor. No, it's not. It's paying back the public taxpayer for what you're costing. We should be putting them. There should be a piece of trash anywhere on any highway in the United States. And it doesn't mean we don't pay them. We can pay them and give them something to learn some work ethic and to have some money when they walk out the door. That's what everybody needs, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I think that that last quote you just said, I mean there shouldn't be a piece of trash in the street. You think about that and then connect it back to prison, popularity, and then the policy, the level of policy discussion we have outside of oh, is this slave labor or is it not slave labor? Right, I understand some of the sentiments behind that, but it's disconnected with reality, right, and so that's what we're trying to grow. I mean, I could talk to you, and I'm sure you could talk for probably months about this stuff, and I know you have on your podcast, so, in kind of closing it out, so somebody listens to this and they go wow, I want to learn a lot more about this stuff. Where do they find you? Who else should they be listening to?
Speaker 2:How can somebody become more educated about? You know the real life behind the walls of prison? Sure sure you know there's kind of a little group of us that has, you know, gained whatever popularity in the last few years. Of course myself, you can find me at wwwtheprisonofficerpodcast. There's also a former Florida DOC guy and his name is Gary York. He's got a podcast on YouTube.
Speaker 2:Anthony Ganji's out of New Jersey and he's got several things on YouTube and a few books. And then William Young out of Nebraska and he's got a couple of books and he focuses really on wellness. But he's quite a character. I love his podcast too. He brings a whole level of energy to it that some of the others don't. But you know, that's all out there. For the correctional officers that are listening, I would like to say May 26th, power Skills for Correctional Officers and Emergency Responders and Beyond comes out, and Power Skills is strictly talking about EQ and the social skills and how that makes you a better officer, strictly talking about EQ and the social skills and how that makes you a better officer. If you can learn how to talk, if you can learn how to listen, you've got power skills, and so that'll be coming out if anybody wants to look that up on Amazon.
Speaker 1:We'll have to drop a promo to power skills and, michael, I very much appreciate you coming on. There's no possible way we could educate ourselves as much as somebody who's lived the life and then has dedicated his I should say lack of retirement to staying engaged and improving the system, so I want to thank you Again.
Speaker 1:you're listening to the Independent Voter Podcast. This is our special series on how it really works healthcare behind bars. Michael Cantrell. Thank you so much. I hope we stay in touch and have an opportunity to continue the discussion with you.
Speaker 1:Anytime I'd be happy to come back. Thank you much and to the audience, later this summer we're going to publish the full series how it Really Works at IVNus to our listeners. I hope you visit IVNus and check out the full series where we dive deeper into these issues of health care behind bars. You know, just this is one issue. We talk about the justice system. We talk about prison reform. If we really want to have reform, we need to understand how it really works.
