Abstract
In Canada, public safety personnel, including correctional officers, experience high rates of mental health problems. Correctional officers’ occupational stress has been characterized as insidious and chronic due to multiple and unpredictable occupational risk factors such as violence, unsupportive colleagues and management, poor prison conditions, and shift work. Given the increased risk of adverse mental health outcomes associated with operational stressors, organizational programs have been developed to provide correctional officers with support to promote mental well-being and to provide mental health interventions that incorporate recovery and reduction in relapse risk. This paper uses two theories, the Job Demand Control Support (JDCS) Model and Social Ecological Model (SEM), to explore why workplace social support programs may not been successful in terms of uptake or effectiveness among correctional officers in Canada. We suggest that structural policy changes implemented in the past 15 years have had unintentional impacts on working conditions that increase correctional officer workload and decrease tangible resources to deal with an increasingly complex prison population. Notably, we believe interpersonal support programs may only have limited success if implemented without addressing the multilevel factors creating conditions of job strain.
Highlights
We focus particular attention on the buffering hypothesis of the Job Demand Control Support (JDCS) model as correctional institutions have implemented social support programs to decrease the psychological impacts of the correctional work environment
When examining the question of why workplace social support programs have not been effective at reducing the mental health outcomes experienced by correctional officers, the Social Ecological Model (SEM) provides a framework to look at this question across multiple levels of influence to see how factors, beyond the individual level, impact individual behaviour [17]
The JDCS and SEM can contribute to the holistic understanding of interpersonal workplace mental health programming for correctional officers
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The authors found that the majority of the studies included in their review did not conduct pre-post evaluations and used inconsistent outcome measures which resulted in poor quality of evidence of the effectiveness of such interventions [14] Despite these methodological challenges, recent research has identified that social support has the potential to reduce the burden of PTSD and major depressive disorders (MDD) among PSP. Support was included as it can provide increased control through the collective control a social group may have over their environment that the individual may not have [22] This expanded model posited that jobs that are low in control, high in demand, and low in support (isostrain jobs) have the most harmful effects on employee health. We focus particular attention on the buffering hypothesis of the JDCS model as correctional institutions have implemented social support programs to decrease the psychological impacts of the correctional work environment
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