A Christmas Protocol for Corrections: Keeping Grounded When the Holidays Hit Hard

Written By Felice Davis

Author: Felice Upton | Connect on LinkedIn
Published December 24, 2025

Harvard professor Arthur Brooks has a "protocol" for navigating holiday disappointment, the gap between the Christmas we remember and the one we're living. His research shows the holidays surface sadness, longing, and sometimes regret because of how memory works.

Now imagine that experience behind bars. Or behind a badge. Or on call.

The reality

Right now, approximately 1.9 million people are spending Christmas incarcerated in the United States. An estimated 2.7 million children have a parent behind bars, many of them measuring time in missed holidays. Meanwhile, correctional staff are working doubles and missing their own family gatherings because chronic understaffing doesn't take holidays off. If you've never left at a holiday gathering and run toward a crisis it might be hard to understand and as I write this, I hope it helps some of you feel seen.

For over a decade, I was on call as a duty officer on or around the holidays. If you've ever carried that phone, you know: those calls are often the hardest. Something about Christmas Eve, about New Year's morning, about the weight of what the season is supposed to be versus what it actually is in a facility. It concentrates everything. The grief. The crises. The moments when someone decides they can't carry it anymore. It is unbelievably hard. AND we don't talk about it enough. If you have a wellness program and are not making space for this- this is an opportunity to do foundational work.

And while most of my experience is in prisons, this goes for everyone who has had hard things happen around the holidays. The first responders leaving Christmas dinner when the phone goes off. The ER nurses and paramedics and firefighters and police officers and social workers who serve while the rest of the world gathers. The dispatchers taking calls from people in their worst moments while carols play somewhere in the background. We carry those holidays differently.

The research tells a complicated story: While general population suicide rates actually decrease on Christmas Day (about 17% lower than regular days), they spike significantly in the week after, a "rebound phenomenon" that catches many off guard. In corrections, the risk factors compound: incarcerated individuals are 3-8 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population. For women, it's more than 10 times higher. READ that again...

And the staff? Recent surveys show approximately 57% of correctional officers report burnout symptoms. Nearly half report post-traumatic stress. The holidays intensify everything. Mandatory overtime means missing children's plays and family dinners, and there's no pause button on hypervigilance.

But also, this...

I remember standing in a facility on Christmas Eve, passing out candy bags. Leaving my own family to do so because I knew how much more my presence there meant... Someone started singing. Then another voice joined. Then another, across multiple tiers, incarcerated people and staff alike, voices rising together in that fluorescent light. It was one of the most beautiful moments I've witnessed in over 20 years in this work.

One man I read about, incarcerated for 26 years, said he volunteered every year to set up the Christmas tree in the visitation area. He organized churches to send cards. He wrote Christmas plays, including one called "Prison Scrooge," because he knew if he didn't find purpose in the pain, it would swallow him.

Both things are true. The heartbreak and the beauty exist in the same space. As one person wrote from inside: "Belonging is where joy is felt and expressed, where home can be a place incarcerated people share."

The generosity that lives in hard places...

I want to pause here and acknowledge something important: every holiday season, incredible acts of kindness happen inside facilities. Quiet, generous, selfless things that rarely make the news.

Incarcerated people pool their commissary money to make sure someone who has nothing gets a holiday meal. They make handmade cards for each other, for staff, for children they may not see for years. They check on the person in the next cell who just got bad news from home.

Staff bring in home-cooked food to share on Christmas Day. Officers swap shifts so a colleague can watch their kid open presents. Chaplains spend hours sitting with people who have no one else. Volunteers drive hours in bad weather to lead a service or simply be present.

Programs like Angel Tree allow incarcerated parents to send Christmas gifts to their children in their own name, a small act that preserves a bond across distance and time. Nonprofits organize transportation so families can make visits they otherwise couldn't afford. In Indiana, a woman named Cecelia Whitfield started driving families to see their loved ones 37 years ago after her own son was incarcerated. What began with just her and her car has grown into a prison shuttle ministry with buses, retreats, and support for families she calls the "hidden victims."

One organization, You Yes You!, brings incarcerated and formerly incarcerated fathers together with their children during the holidays. As one father put it: "That physical touch means everything. To be able to see your kids run in there and call your name. It takes away everything that's happening back in the dorm."

This generosity doesn't erase the hardship. But it matters. It's evidence that humanity persists, even in the hardest circumstances.

A protocol for leaders

Arthur Brooks says happiness rests on three "macronutrients": enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, supported by four pillars: faith, family, friends, and meaningful work. Here's how to apply that framework in corrections this season:

1. Protect connection like it's oxygen, because it is.

Research consistently shows that maintaining family ties improves health, behavior, and reduces recidivism. Yet families often live 100+ miles from their incarcerated loved ones, and many facilities have restricted contact visits to glass-only or eliminated them entirely.

What you can do now: Protect phone calls and video visits fiercely through the holiday. Extend hours where possible. Don't let budget constraints or staffing challenges cut off someone's only lifeline to their children on Christmas Day. One family described their incarcerated loved one calling "10 times on Christmas Day to get to talk to everybody." Those calls aren't a luxury. They're prevention.

2. Create moments of shared enjoyment.

Brooks' formula: Pleasure + People + Memory = Enjoyment. That Christmas Eve singing wasn't in any policy manual. It happened because someone created a small opening, candy bags, that let connection pour through.

What you can do now:

  • Organize a simple shared meal, even from commissary items

  • Allow and encourage holiday cards. The handmade ones matter most.

  • Let the choir practice happen. Let the decorations go up.

  • Have an incarcerated person dress as Santa for visiting children (many facilities do this and it works)

  • Create space for worship services across faith traditions

The Vera Institute documented how incarcerated people often piece together holiday meals from vending machines and commissary items, summer sausage "rib tips," saltine biscuits, because the connection of making something together matters more than the menu.

3. Name the hard thing out loud.

Brooks' research shows that simply naming difficult emotions reduces their power. Don't pretend the holidays are normal.

What you can do now:

  • In briefings and rounds, acknowledge it: "This is a hard time. I see you."

  • Train staff to recognize signs of distress: withdrawal, changes in behavior, giving away possessions

  • Check specifically on those who had no visitors, no calls

  • Staff check-ins matter too: "I know you're missing your kid's recital. That's real."

4. Watch the quiet hours, and the week after.

Research shows the highest risk often comes after the holiday passes, when visits end, calls disconnect, and January stretches out gray and long. The "rebound phenomenon" is real.

What you can do now:

  • Increase rounds and welfare checks December 26 through January 7

  • Staff single-cell housing more carefully (single-cell occupancy is a known suicide risk factor)

  • Build in mental health check-ins post-holiday, not just pre-holiday

  • For staff: recognize that the crash after working through holidays is coming. Plan coverage and decompression time.

5. Take care of your people who take care of people.

Correctional staff experience burnout at alarming rates, and the holidays amplify it. Mandatory overtime, missing family events, no time to decompress. One officer described it: "I sometimes didn't get home until 10:30 p.m., exhausted and facing the start of a new shift just a few hours later."

This is true across all of public safety. The EMT who misses her daughter's first Christmas morning. The officer who's worked every Thanksgiving for five years straight. The chaplain who carries everyone else's grief home.

What you can do now:

  • Peer support check-ins during and after holiday shifts

  • Even small acknowledgments matter. A meal for staff working Christmas. A thank you that's specific and real.

  • Create informal debrief opportunities. One veteran officer said his ride home with trusted colleagues was his lifeline: "That let me go home without bringing all of that stuff home."

  • Model it from the top: if you're asking staff to work, be present. Walk the units. Carry the weight alongside them.

6. Let the beauty exist alongside the pain.

Don't rush past the tender moments because they feel complicated. When someone sings, let them sing. When tears come, let them come. Research confirms what we know in our bones: meaningful activity, connection, and purpose are protective. They're not "soft" extras. They're survival.

Transformation happens when we stop pretending that incarceration strips away humanity. It doesn't. The holidays prove it.

To every correctional leader working this season, to every first responder leaving your family to serve someone else's: this is sacred, hard ground. Your presence matters more than any policy.

To everyone spending Christmas behind bars or behind a badge: You are not forgotten.

And to those of us who have carried the duty phone through the holidays, who know the weight of those calls, I see you. What we do matters, even when it costs us.

Brooks writes that no family is perfect, and we should stop waiting for ours to be. Families are "love and conflict mashed together." The same is true for the complicated families we build inside facilities, the ones forged between staff and residents, between people who share space in hard circumstances. It doesn't have to be perfect to be meaningful.

So here's my wish for you: I hope you have a wonderful holiday season. And if it's not wonderful, that's okay too. If it's complicated, if it's heavy, if you're working through it or grieving through it or just getting through it, you're not alone. Sometimes just getting through is enough.

Be gentle with yourselves. Be gentle with each other.

For Further Reading:

Felice Davis
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