Title: Correctional officer suicides in 2019 tied for most in single year: Union president - ABC News
Headings: Correctional officer suicides in 2019 tied for most in single year: Union president
Correctional officer suicides in 2019 tied for most in single year: Union president
News headlines today: Dec. 23, 2020

Content: Sara D. Davis/Getty Images
Deaths by suicide among correctional officers so far in 2019 have tied the highest total ever recorded, according to the head of their union. Year to date, 13 cases have been documented. "We're on course for an all-time record of suicide of staff," Shane Fausey, the new CPL-33 Correctional Officers Union president, told ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas. Bureau of Prisons union officials for years have been calling for an increase in staffing to match skyrocketing incarceration rates. (MORE: Law enforcement suicides up 24 percent in 2019, advocacy group says)
Fausey said insufficient staffing and other job-related stressors could be contributing to the suicides, but the Bureau of Prisons doesn't have hard data on that. "Unfortunately, the staffing crisis has lead into other issues for employees of the Bureau of Prisons," Fausey said. " There's a human factor to this staffing crisis." NY Daily News via Getty Images, FILE
The Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Conn., is pictured from above, March 22, 2004. According to a University of California, Berkeley Study in 2018, correctional officers are at a high risk for depression, PTSD and suicide.