The Whalley Ave. jail, as viewed from Hudson St. Correction officers, or C.O.s, are so stressed they divorce at a 70 percent rate, and their average life expectancy is an alarming 59 years, far less than the national average.Those stats and ​“un-siloing” of the plight of C.O.s were at the heart of an unusual, sobering panel discussion at Albertus Magnus College — all about trying to find holistic reform of a broken prison system.About 30 people gathered Monday night at the Catholic Dominican college’s Behan Community Room, at the eastern end of the campus near Winchester Avenue, to participate in a panel titled ​“Seeking Correctional Reform.”They heard an urgent plea to focus not only on the incarcerated but also the working conditions, psychological training (or general lack thereof), recruitment, and the low-grade PTSD and fear of violence that are at the heart of a correction officer’s daily routine.Or as one of the panelists, Prof. John Lawrie, put it, ​“If we’re really going to shift from punishment to rehabilitation, which seems like a dream, it’s got to be carried out by correctional staff.”Panelists spoke about the country spending $100 billion nationally to imprison people. There’s not much rehabilitation going on, and less dignity being preserved, so that 75 percent are right back in jail within five years.Correcting the training, recruitment, and working conditions of C.O.s may be one of the biggest under-discussed solutions to the problem.Lawrie chairs the college’s department of criminal justice and became an academic after retiring from a career as a C.O. at the maximum security MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield.“I worked there for 20 years and went to 26 funerals [of fellow corrections officers],” he reported by way of underlining the stresses of the job.The other panelists included Dr. John Watts, the director of criminal and restorative justice programs at the University of Saint Joseph and a champion of trauma-recognition training for C.O.s, and Jacqueline Purcell, the executive director of Evolution Reentry Services.“Since so many prisoners have trauma,” said Watts, who is also a retired probation officer. He has led a campaign to include trauma training in the curriculums of correction officers’ academies. ​“We have to put dignity back in our correctional work.”Purcell, who has founded what she described as the only re-entry program for women, brought an insider’s perspective and her experience of a year imprisoned for a financial crime at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury:“Correction officers are trained only to break up fights and to babysit, but I had a number and I felt less than,” she said.That creates huge stress and contributes to trauma and while she acknowledges corrections officers also have trauma — ​“they after all also go to prison every day” — the officers need new training so they can put the prisoners’ needs above their own.Albertus honor student Christian Brangi, who aspires to be a correction officer (or a state trooper, his mind being not made up on the matter), was the designated student respondent to the panelists.Quoting research he had done to prepare, Brangi reported C.O.s (due to under staffing) often work 16-hour shifts, stop suicides, break up fights and it’s ​“not unusual for them to come home with blood or human excrement on their uniforms.”They are exhausted and traumatized, he went on, with a PTSD rate more than double the military, a suicide rate far higher than police officers, and they are often shunned (for alleged weakness or not being a team player) if they complain. ​“How can prison succeed if corrections staff is suffering?”“Young people will change this,” Purcell said optimistically.All the panelists were at pains to point out that while the public’s safety remains the system’s ultimate goal, to maintain that siloed thinking, adding a program here or there around the edges, is no longer enough.New thinking is needed: reforms, new approaches, and new paradigms that are wholistic — for the prisoners, the C.O.s (also including those outside of prison walls but in the probation system), and also for the families of the incarcerated.“The families go through what prisoners do — they are strip-searched too,” said Purcell.“The divorce rate of correction officers is 70 percent and the divorce rate of prisoners is the same. We all want the same thing,” she went on, the same kind of wholistic, dignity-centered reforms, ​“but we’re all fighting each other.”To speak with such candor, the panelists agreed, is making them unpopular in the field. Yet speak they did, and also with personal candor.Lawrie added: ​“At MacDougall I went to 26 funerals in 20 years. I waited three years after retirement before I got therapy. I didn’t want to be viewed as weak, so I drank. My passion is that new C.O.s not go through what I did.”As a C.O., said Watts, ​“Your heart rate is up, your head swivels, you go to work in a place of violence.”While there are some programs, like the ones Watts has initiated that incorporate trauma training and self-care and wellness, much more is needed.“If you don’t care for yourself, you take it home. We need to have an uncomfortable conversation.”The Albertus panel, which was moderated by Prof. Robert Bourgeois, and sponsored by the college’s Eckhart Center, was part of it.Panelists John Watts, Jacqueline Purcell, John Lawrie. Student respondent Christian Brangi and Justice Panel Committee chair Albertus Prof. Robert Bourgeois.