Date of Conferral

7-15-2026

Date of Award

July 2026

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Criminal Justice

Advisor

Donal Hardin

Abstract

Correctional officers are responsible for the care, custody, safety, and supervision of inmates within jails, prisons, and correctional institutions. They face many hardships within a prison setting including inmate suicides. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore and understand the perceptions of Florida state correctional officers who have experienced inmate suicide firsthand. This study was formulated using the transcendental, descriptive phenomenology approach and addressed the study’s research questions. Participants included nine Florida state certified correctional officers who witnessed an inmate suicide. Participants were selected using purposive snowball sampling. Interviews were scheduled and conducted via ZOOM or by telephone which were audio recorded. Quirkos software program was used to analyze the data collected as well as hand line-by-line coding. The following themes emerged from the study’s findings and detailed the participants’ perceptions of inmate suicide: training and preparedness, correctional responsibility, professional empathy, emotional impact and desensitization, and behavioral indicators. Implications for social change include creating literature addressing correctional officers’ hardships, gaining insight, and understanding on how correctional officers directly experience inmate suicides, and creating suicide detection and prevention training for prison institutions to utilize worldwide. The study’s results may lead to the implementation of resources correctional officers can utilize after experiencing an inmate suicide and assist with their mental well-being.

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