What if she'd remained a hairdresser? What if she'd been able to work in salons instead of prisons for the past 33 years? How would that person compare to the one she had become - the seasoned correctional officer who'd seen and felt and heard it all?

"I often wonder if I would have been a nicer person," Ms Rudd told the Mercury.

"Prisons have probably hardened me up. But I probably needed it."

At 22, from a self-described "sheltered upbringing", Ms Rudd's doctor put an end to her hairdressing career before it had really begun.

The chemicals aggravated her allergies and dermatitis. She changed shampoos, only to wake one morning in a full-body rash.

After tests, her doctor told her: "give up hairdressing or you'll be dead before you're 40".

"I was devastated," said Ms Rudd, who now works at South Coast Correctional Centre in Nowra. "It was all I'd ever wanted to do."

A friend suggested she try prison work, but her boyfriend practically forbade it. She quickly signed up for the academy.

Both Ms Rudd's mother and boyfriend (now husband) worked in prisons, but neither could prepare her for the shocks of her first day on the job at Parramatta Gaol - a maximum security facility for male inmates.

Ms Rudd followed her boyfriend's instruction not to walk around the outside of the prison yard because "otherwise they'll know that you're scared", but the advice set the scene for a baptism of fire. As the slight 22-year-old cut through scores of inmates, she heard names and saw body parts she would never have been exposed to in any salon.

"I was copping all this abuse," Ms Rudd said.

"I was thinking, 'is this what this job's about?'."

Ms Rudd is sharing some of her stories from the job in the leadup to National Corrections Day (Friday, January 19), which is aimed at celebrating Australia's 25,000 corrections staff and showing the many layers to their work, including security and safety and offender rehabilitation work such as education to counselling.

Lifted by the camaraderie she shared with other officers and not wanting to put her training to waste, Ms Rudd persisted with the job after her Parramatta beginnings. Her next posting was at Norma Parker Centre, a minimum security facility for women, where she saw work that convinced her of the good that prisons could do.

The female inmates probably challenged the female staff more than the male inmates - "but that was a great jail, Norma Parker. because it helped offenders, especially long-term offenders, have relationships with their children", Ms Rudd said.

"On the weekends we would dress in normal clothes so the inmates could tell their children when they came to visit that they were in hospital.

"They would progress. They would go to a different area and cook for themselves. We gave them life skills to survive outside after they'd done their sentence."

Ms Rudd has made it her practice never to look an inmate up online. She says she doesn't want to know what they've done to end up inside.

Ms Rudd believes the increasing focus on an individual-first, case management approach has changed the prison environment radically since her early days at Parramatta.

"I think when the case management came in it just quietened down the jails down and it broke down the barriers between officer and inmate," she said.

"You just build a repore. It's professional - there's always a boundary that doesn't get crossed.

"I'm here for the security and safety of the inmates, I'm not here to judge them or penalise them."

With another officer, Ms Rudd once brought an inmate back to life. She has witnessed a lot of trauma. She says the job doesn't scare her - mostly because the officers have one another's backs - but she has, several times, felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

As part of her efforts to look after her mental health, she makes herself forget their names of the men and women who've come into her custody. But she cannot forget her darkest day on the job, or how it made her feel.

Ms Rudd was working as visits officer at Mid North Coast Correctional Centre in Kempsey on the April 2021 day that fatal contraband made it inside the prison.

A young inmate known only as LT died in agonising circumstances soon after a woman, accompanied by a man, paid him a suspiciously short visit.

A forensic pathologist later found multiple ruptured rubber balloons full of methylamphetamine inside the mans' stomach.

"I just felt uneasy with that visitor. I just felt there was something not right - like a sixth sense," said Ms Rudd.

"I still get emotional, and I don't know why that is.

"It was horrific and it probably still upsets me today, because he's someone's son."

Corrective Services NSW will this week honour its 10,700 employees for overseeing more than 12,000 inmates in prison and supervising over 34,000 offenders in the community as they complete court orders or parole.

CSNSW deputy commissioner security and custody Dr Anne-Marie Martin said National Corrections Day was a day for colleagues and the public to give thanks to the often-unseen work corrections staff undertake.

"Having a day of recognition for CSNSW staff helps them to know that the work they do, and their commitment to community safety, is seen and valued."