By Matthew J. Rhoden
The holding cell carries the smell of a body that’s gone a few days without a shower. She’s standing in the corner, a thin gray blanket clutched tight in her hand, muttering something I can’t quite make out. Her eyes track something none of the rest of us can see.
Other officers are already in position. One is holding the shackles. Another repeats the same instruction, louder each time: “Ma’am, I need you to turn around and place your hands behind your back.”
She doesn’t move. She doesn’t even look at him. Her grip on the blanket doesn’t loosen.
Another voice joins in, rising to match the first. “Ma’am. Turn around.”
Still nothing.
To anyone watching from the doorway, it looks like defiance — a woman digging in, daring us to make her move. The tension in the room is climbing by the second, and I can feel where this is headed: hands-on, a struggle, a report that will take the rest of the shift to write.
My CIT training kicks in before I’ve fully decided to use it. Right now, in this fluorescent-lit box with commands stacking on top of each other, this doesn’t read to me as defiance. It reads as someone who cannot process what’s being asked of her fast enough to comply.
“Everyone stop for a second,” I say.
The room goes quiet. Every officer turns to look at me instead of her, and for the first time in several minutes, nobody is talking at all.
What everyone saw
None of the officers in that cell did anything wrong. Every one of them was responding in a way consistent with their training: give clear commands, escalate if there’s no compliance, apply restraints and move the transport along. An Emergency Detention Order carries real time pressure. She needed to be at the facility, and every minute in that cell was a minute the transport was delayed.
From where they stood, a woman was standing motionless, saying nothing usable and refusing to comply with a simple, repeated instruction. That reads as resistance. It reads as a use-of-force situation building in real time, and reacting to it that way is not a mistake. It’s the job working as designed.
I want to be clear about that because this isn’t a story about anyone doing something wrong. It’s a story about what happens when someone in the room sees something slightly different.
What I saw differently
An estimated 7% of police contacts in jurisdictions with populations of 100,000 or more involve individuals with mental illness. [1] Research examining fatal police shootings has also found that roughly a quarter of those killed exhibited signs of mental illness. [2] Those numbers help explain why Crisis Intervention Team training exists — 40 hours designed to help officers recognize mental illness, de-escalate crisis situations and connect people with appropriate resources. [3]
I’m CIT-trained. That training exists for exactly this moment — the one where a behavior that reads as defiance to an untrained eye is actually a person in crisis, unable to keep pace with what’s being demanded of them.
Serious mental illness can affect how a person processes external stimulation, especially under stress. Multiple commands, raised voices, restraints staged in her peripheral vision — that’s not a simple instruction landing on a calm, cooperative mind. That’s sensory input stacking faster than it can be sorted. What looked like a decision not to comply may instead have been an inability to organize what compliance would even look like fast enough to keep pace with everything coming at her at once.
That’s the difference between passive resistance and a mind that’s overloaded, and from the doorway they can look almost identical. CIT training exists to teach officers how to tell them apart — and to act on it, even when it means asking everyone else in the room to pause.
Why it worked
I asked the other officers to give me a minute, and I walked over to her — slower than I normally would, hands visible, voice low. I didn’t repeat the command. I asked her a question instead: Did she know why we were here and what was happening next?
I listened to what she said, confirmed what she already understood and filled in what she was missing, one plain sentence at a time.
Then I narrated everything before I did it. I told her I was going to put the shackles on her ankles first, and I did. I told her about the belly chain before I touched it. I told her we were about to walk out of the cell and where she’d be sitting in the van once we got there.
At each step, where it was reasonable, I gave her a choice — which side to sit on, which hand to extend first. None of those choices changed the outcome. But they gave her something to hold onto besides three strangers deciding everything for her.
It took less than five minutes. No raised voices, no restraint struggle, no injuries to her or to staff. She walked out of that cell and into the van the same way anyone else would — because for those five minutes, she wasn’t being commanded. She was being included.
It’s not complicated. It’s not even new. It’s the CIT model, applied in real time, under real pressure, in a room where everyone was already braced for the opposite outcome.
The conversation with my sergeant
Afterward, I found my sergeant and did what felt right at the time: I apologized. I’d stepped in front of the response mid-motion and told everyone to stop, without rank to back it up and without asking permission first.
He didn’t see it that way. He told me I’d done exactly what I should have done. He said I’d likely saved everyone in that cell from a use-of-force incident — and saved him from the hours of paperwork that follow one. More than that, he pointed out that I’d probably kept her from getting hurt in a struggle she wasn’t equipped to understand, let alone win.
That conversation is the one I still think about. Not because I did anything heroic — I didn’t. I asked people to pause. But it’s the moment I understood that speaking up in that cell wasn’t a risk to my standing with the officers around me. It was exactly what the job needed from whoever happened to notice it first.
Lessons I took away
Resistance and inability can look identical: They aren’t the same thing. One is a choice. The other is a person who can’t keep up with what’s being asked of them. From the doorway, both look like stillness. Both look like silence. Learning to tell them apart isn’t instinct — it’s attention.
Training to recognize crisis isn’t a soft skill — it’s tactical: Knowing the signs of a mind in crisis isn’t about sympathy. It’s situational awareness. CIT training exists because those signs are learnable. They’re not guesswork, and they’re not intuition you either have or don’t. They change how you read a room in real time — if you’ve put in the training to notice them.
Thirty seconds is not the same as losing control: Asking a room to pause feels, in the moment, like it might look weak. It isn’t. It’s often the fastest way to a safe outcome — because force takes far longer to process, document and recover from than patience does.
Rank doesn’t have to be the reason someone speaks up: I wasn’t the ranking officer in that cell. I had information. I used it. Corrections culture holds together when officers feel safe saying “wait” — regardless of stripes.
Preventing a use of force is a win, even if nobody writes it up: There’s no incident report for the fight that didn’t happen. That doesn’t make it less of a win. It’s still the best outcome available, every time it’s achievable. It deserves to be treated like one.
Closing
Every correctional officer will eventually face a moment when policy tells them what they’re authorized to do. Experience is what helps them recognize when 30 seconds of patience might produce a better outcome instead.
That day reminded me that some of the best decisions we make in corrections aren’t measured by what we did. They’re measured by what we prevented.
I still think about the blanket. How she clutched it like it was the one thing in that room she had any control over — right up until we gave her a few more things to hold onto instead.
References
- Bureau of Justice Assistance. Frequently Asked Questions: How many people in our country have mental illnesses and how does this affect law enforcement agencies? U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. The BJA cites research estimating that 7% of police contacts in jurisdictions with populations of 100,000 or more involve individuals with mental illness.
- Frankham E. Mental Illness Affects Police Fatal Shootings. Contexts, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2018. The analysis examined nearly 2,000 fatal police shootings in the United States during 2015 and 2016 and found that approximately one-quarter of those killed exhibited signs of mental illness.
- Vickers B. Memphis, Tennessee, Police Department’s Crisis Intervention Team. Bureau of Justice Assistance Bulletin, U.S. Department of Justice, July 2000. The report describes the Memphis CIT model, including its intensive 40-hour training program for officers responding to people experiencing mental health crises.
The views expressed are my own and are not intended to represent those of my employer.
About the author
Matthew J. Rhoden has spent more than a decade in corrections, working in both community corrections and county jail facilities. He writes about leadership, crisis communication, inmate management, and professional decision-making.
He is Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) trained and has completed Sections I through IV of the National Command & Staff College’s Institute for Credible Leadership Development as well as the Authentic & Deliberate Leadership: The West Point Way course. Matthew is especially passionate about mental health in corrections — both the inmates in custody and the officers who supervise them — and believes the profession is strongest when it treats both as part of the same conversation.
Matthew is equally dedicated to working with young people, the future leaders of our communities. He has served as a counselor for the Indiana Sheriffs’ Association Sheriff’s Youth Leadership Camp and most recently coordinated his agency’s participation in the program — work recognized twice with an Indiana Sheriffs’ Association Meritorious Service Commendation Certificate. He is committed to helping corrections professionals develop the judgment and communication skills that strengthen their careers — and, in turn, the organizations they serve.