Correctional officer wellbeing in Australia

This article attempts to overview the strategies, programs, and support aimed at addressing the challenge of promoting and maintaining mental health and wellbeing amongst correctional officers working in Australian prisons, by focusing on New South Wales and Victoria. Australia is a country without a system of Federal prisons, so, staff in all places of detention are managed by correctional departments in each Australian State or Territory, and, not by the Federal Government. This means that there can be up to eight different governments and their departments taking different approaches to these issues. Following this overview, a number of Australian research projects on the mental health and wellbeing of correctional officers in Australia will be overviewed, including a study on the wellbeing of Indigenous Australian correctional officers. These are all studies that make clear calls for what should be the future of research in this area in Australia and otherwise.