Prison Workers Research Articles

Caring for prisoners: towards mindful practice

Those caring for prisoners are subject to the influences of the dominant custodial discourses of security and risk management that prevail in a prison environment. The conflicting caring and custodial roles adopted by nurses working in prisons and by prison officers constitute the foundation for further exploration of prisoner care in the wider healthcare literature. In this discussion paper, we argue that the identities and practices of those working in prison care are significantly shaped by organisational and societal discourses and that these generate rigidities and defensive mechanisms that limit the development of practice. We argue that a greater emphasis on mindfulness in professional development and clinical supervision may be helpful in enabling prison workers involved in caring roles to enter a professional dialogue characterised by openness, inclusion and engagement. This, we argue, would facilitate the development of newer and richer understandings of practice and to a revitalisation of professional engagement.

Empathy and punishment

With its foundations of injury, harm, and pain, the sociology of punishment is poised to give attention to the role of empathy at precisely those instances of social experience where human connection, understanding, and social knowing are destroyed, avoided, prohibited, or simply impossible. I explore this predicament through a specific case drawn from fieldwork in a geriatric prison, where institutional and intersubjective relations established by prison workers challenge empathic connections. The ‘graying’ of the prison population, one of mass incarceration’s unanticipated consequences, brings issues of pain, death, and dying to the fore. The majority of research to date on aging and dying in prison has had an important descriptive and policy orientation. There has been less of an emphasis upon the theoretical underpinnings of such a turn and the nature of intersubjective relations at the intersection of care and punishment. There have been no intensive ground-level analyses of aging in prison against the backdrop of mass incarceration in the contemporary era. This study seeks to fill that vacuum while offering a more complex understanding of the relevance and limits of empathy to the study of punishment.

Intracolleague Aggression in a Group of Dutch Prison Workers

This study examined workplace aggression among a Dutch group of 174 prison workers at 10 penitentiaries in the Netherlands. The purpose of the study was to investigate the main and interaction effects of Type D personality and violence on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The results showed a significant interaction effect between the type of violence and Type D personality. Physically violated Type D individuals achieved the highest average score on the PTSD scale. Type D personality was found to have a strong main effect on PTSD.

Self-Perceived Role and Function of Christian Prison Chaplains and Buddhist Volunteers in Hong Kong Prisons

Although there have been a handful of studies examining the work of chaplains and prison volunteers in a Western setting, few have endeavored to conduct research into the experiences of religious workers in Asian penitentiaries. To fill this gap, this article reports on exploratory research examining the work of a selected group of religious workers in Hong Kong prisons. A total of 17 religious workers were interviewed: 10 prison chaplains and 7 Buddhist volunteers who paid regular prison visits. Qualitative findings generated from in-depth interviews present three themes: the range of religious activities performed, the importance of religion for the rehabilitation of inmates, and the hope of continued religious support to prisoners after discharge. The significance of this research is that it sheds light on the understudied work of prison chaplains and volunteers in Hong Kong and portrays the difference between the works of the Christian ministry and Buddhist volunteers.

Work ability, psychosocial hazards and work experience in prison environments

Work ability is predicted by age- and work-related psychosocial hazards; however, its association with work experience has not been studied. Work ability has not been studied in prison environments as well. To describe work ability and its associates among prison workers. A cross-sectional study was carried out in two prisons in Spain, one large and one medium prison, randomly selected from 17 in total. Prison workers were randomly administered a voluntary anonymous questionnaire to measure work ability [Work Ability Index (WAI)], work-related psychosocial hazards (Spanish version of COPSOQ), sociodemographic, lifestyle and work-related variables. Four hundred and forty-one workers (54%) participated. Results confirmed that older and more experienced workers (analysis of variance analysis) and workers in large prisons (t-student) presented significantly lower WAI scores. Quantitative and emotional demands, family work conflict, low work control, low autonomy, low social support from colleagues and stress had negative significant associations with WAI. Age, which highly correlated with work experience (Spearman's r = 0.85), had significant association with WAI (beta = -0.62). In the stepwise linear regression, the association between age and WAI lost statistical significance after controlling for work experience, which maintained significant correlation with WAI (beta = -0.37). The apparent association between age and WAI was confounded by work experience. Interventions to improve work ability among prison workers may benefit from results of this study to focus their efforts on the risk groups in such a psychologically demanding work environment rarely examined in previous research.

P1-149 Tuberculosis knowledge differences among several professionals in a Brazilian city with a big prison

BackgroundAs tuberculosis (TB) is highly prevalent among prisoners, it is important that health service professionals and professionals in close contact with prisoners are acquainted with diagnostic, prevention and control basic...

Exposure to psychosocial risks at work in prisons: does contact with inmates matter? A pilot study among prison workers in Spain.

Research has lately increased its focus on work conditions as predictors of stress among prison workers but only few studies have focused on how the exposure of workers to psychosocial risks vary according to their occupational groups and their contact with inmates. Work psychosocial risks (demands, control and social support) were assessed using the Spanish version of the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire among 164 Spanish prison workers (43 per cent of those surveyed). Regression analysis was used to explore how psychosocial hazards and their combinations (outcome variables) vary according to occupational groups. Results suggest that psychosocial risks were highest among guards that have more contact with inmates. Implications of the findings for policy making and practice application are discussed.

‘What works’ for juvenile prisoners: the role of group climate in a youth prison

The Dutch juvenile justice system locks up an increasing number of adolescent boys and girls at a cost of approximately €250,000 for each inmate annually (Boone & Moerings, 2007; Tonry, 2005). Questions have been raised, however, about the cost‐effectiveness of treatment in closed institutions. This study, with a sample of 49 adolescents residing in a Dutch youth prison, examined the role of group climate in establishing and maintaining treatment effects. Results show that an open group climate, with group workers paying more attention to the psychological needs of the adolescents and giving them ‘space’ to experiment, led to inmates feeling that they were ‘being understood by the group workers’. This perception of being understood was associated with greater treatment motivation and higher internal locus of control. Positive prison workers in the living group turned out to be a key factor in building an open group climate and subsequently higher internal locus of control and greater treatment motivation.

Peer and inmate aggression, type D‐personality and post‐traumatic stress among Dutch prison workers

AbstractThis study investigated the adverse effects of exposure to inmate or peer aggression, type D‐personality and their interactions on post‐traumatic stress reactions among a sample of prison workers. The basic tenet of type D‐personality is that not so much the experience of negative emotions per se is responsible for negative health consequences, but rather the way individuals cope with such emotions. Many studies have revealed diverse adverse health outcomes of type D‐personality, particularly among cardiac patients. However, the moderating effect of social inhibition has never been statistically examined in other populations. Participants (111 men, 40 women) were recruited in 10 Dutch correctional institutions. The results showed that victims of aggression are more prone to develop Post‐traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms than non‐victims, although this particularly applied to victims of peer aggression. Furthermore, an interaction effect was observed between inmate aggression and type D‐personality. Finally, both peer aggression and type D‐personality contributed to the development of PTSD. The results were discussed together with recommendations for future research. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Here today, gone tomorrow, back again the next day: Antecedents of correctional absenteeism

Correctional agencies are labor intensive, and many of the posts in a prison cannot be vacated, often leading to mandatory overtime. Despite the high costs and inconvenience associated with absenteeism in prisons, little empirical work was conducted on the antecedents of sick leave use by correctional workers. From self-reported data of workers in federal prisons in 1994, the results of this study indicated that decisions to use sick leave were independent of the culture of the prisons, and that many of the variables found to be associated with sick leave use in other settings also applied to correctional settings. In particular, the authors found that job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job stress, and personal characteristics were associated with the use of sick leave. Surprisingly, tobacco use was not.

231 A comprehensive study of hepatitis C virus prevalence and risk factors in the incarcerated setting: inmates, parolees and prison workers in California state corrections

231 A comprehensive study of hepatitis C virus prevalence and risk factors in the incarcerated setting: inmates, parolees and prison workers in California state corrections

Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality

This book examines the experiences of black railroad workers from the late antebellum era through the modern civil rights movement. Eric Arnesen shows how blacks initially gained jobs as enslaved construction and maintenance workers and continued to work in the southern railroad industry through the Civil War years. With emancipation, southern railroad men stereotyped free black workers as unreliable but nonetheless hired growing numbers of black workers as wage laborers and prison workers under the notorious convict lease system. Although nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century blacks worked in such skilled jobs as fireman and brakeman, they nonetheless occupied the bottom rungs of the railroad labor force. Blacks continued to work in a variety of railroad jobs through the mid-twentieth century, but certain ideological, managerial, and technological changes ushered in the “service” worker or porter as the most popular image of the black railroad worker in the white mind. As railway companies established a chain of restaurants and later dining and sleeping cars, the porter stereotype symbolized the hardening of the color line in the railroad industry. Although the color line was by no means uniform across time or space, it endured until the onset of the modern civil rights movement. In careful detail, Arnesen demonstrates how the persistence of racial barriers in the railroad industry resulted from the interplay of the discriminatory policies of employers, rank-and-file white workers, racist unions, and the state. In addition to ongoing class and racial discrimination by employers, white workers waged a concerted campaign to subordinate the black worker. They organized petitions to management, initiated acts of mob violence, staged hate strikes, and secured hostile state legislation such as the “full crew” laws, which limited black employment in upper south, border, and northern states.

"Soul" in Blake's Writing: Redeeming the Word

Why wilt thou Examine little fibre of my Spreading them out before the Sun like Stalks of flax to dry The is beautiful but its anatomy Horrible Ghast & Deadly (Erdman 302, 167) (1) To show outrage at this objectifying examination by a person who was once a part of the speaker's own self, each of the speakers in this repeated passage invokes the rhetorical weight of the word soul, a word that in the Christian tradition defines the most essential, sacred, and inviolable aspect of the human self. By insisting on its materiality, however, -- every little fibre ... spread [...] out before the Sun like Stalks of flax to dry, a dessicating anatomy/Horrible Ghast & Deadly--the speaker is not simply literalizing an imaginative metaphor but bringing together with ironic force a cluster of older spiritual meanings and newer materialistic meanings for soul. In this ironic constellation, a precarious Judeo-Christian unity of the self as an autonomous subject claiming moral agency and thus capable of redemptive choice is pulled in one direction by a Platonic, dualistic definition of as a repudiation of bodily materiality for spiritual redemption and pulled in another by an Enlightenment science that was discovering the fibres of a nervous system linked to a material brain. Associated with this Enlightenment science through the speaker's invocation of a materialist infant joy is still another shift of meaning for soul, a center of emotional response to the senses, a defined by sensibility. To read these lines from Blake's late epics as totally material is to make the speaker sound like a victim from an Amnesty International report--or like the dismembered traitor Foucault so famously describes in his opening chapter of Discipline and Punish. To read the punishment as psychological is to make Enion or Albion, the examiners, into agents of surveillance like the prison workers in Bentham's Panopticon, which Foucault describes in a later chapter. Such a reading would seem more modern in Foucault's historicizing schema of punishment, and of social order more generally, as an increasingly internalized discipline. Yet the history of usages for the word soul in Blake's time--and the practice of his own usages--traces changes in subjectivity or selfhood that are messier than Foucault's powerful model for epistemic change in Discipline and Punish. This pattern in usage for the word soul during Blake's era is historically opposed to Foucault's model, which turns from spiritual or mental to physica l and material--and then, a little later, back to a secularized psychological meaning. In Blake's own writing, the linguistic polyvalence is wonderfully fluid, with many usages appearing even in the same work. Richard Rorty claims that such multivalence in a single, culturally central word reflects a gradual, collective, and only semi-conscious shift in episteme (Rorty 6-7); in an era of transition the multiplicity of meaning in soul would generate ironies even without conscious artistry or intention to direct them. I will argue, however, that Blake is aware of these historical shifts in the meaning of soul and that he plays creatively with those shifts. A deconstructive argument like Molly Rothen-berg's might conclude that even Blake's intentional creative play with meaning can act only as a critique of existing structures and beliefs and cannot build new structures and beliefs. That is, creative play with multiple meanings of soul might use materialist meaning to criticize a rigid dualism or a rigid a nti-corporeal morality, but it could assert no coherent new synthesis--irony would destroy agency (Rothenberg 4-6). In another critical space, I suggest that Blake uses these multiple meanings of soul to aim toward a resurrected spiritual corporeality, an embodied and imagined self based both upon Enlightenment materialism and upon Paul's I Corinthians 15:3944: All flesh is not the same flesh. …

Other People's Blood: U.S. Immigration Prisons in the Reagan Decade.

During the 1980s thousands of refugees from Central America, who sought safe haven in the United States, found themselves incarcerated in immigration prisonsabused by their jailors and deprived of the most basic legal and human rights. Drawing on declassified government documents and interviews with more than 3,000 Central American refugees, Kahn portrays the chilling reality of daily life in immigration prisons and reveals how the Department of Justice and the Immigration and Naturalization Service intentionally violated federal laws and regulations to deny protection to refugees fleeing wars financed by U.S. military aid. }During the 1980s hundreds of thousands of refugees fled civil wars and death squads in Central America, seeking safe haven in the United States. Instead, thousands found themselves incarcerated in immigration prisonsabused by their jailors and deprived of the most basic legal and human rights. Drawing on declassified government documents and interviews with prison officials, INS staff, and more than 3,000 Central American refugees, Robert S. Kahn reveals how the Department of Justice and its dependent agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, intentionally violated federal laws and regulations to deny protection to refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala who were fleeing wars financed by U.S. military aid.Kahn portrays the chilling reality of daily life in immigration prisons in Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana. Behind the razor-topped prison walls, refugees were not simply denied political asylum; they were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, and sometimes tortured by prison guards. Other Peoples Blood traces the ten-year legal struggle by volunteer prison workers and attorneys to stop the abuse of refugees and to force the Justice Department to concede in court that its treatment of immigrants had violated U. S. laws and the Geneva Convention for over a decade. Yet the case of American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh, which overturned more judicial decisions than any other case in U.S. history, is still virtually unknown in the United States, and today the debate over illegal immigration is being carried on with little awareness of the government policies that contributed so shamefully to this countrys immigration problems. }

Job control and occupational outcomes among prison workers*

Management studies have shown considerable theoretical development and empirical support for the proposition that giving workers an opportunity to influence decision making and to control operations results in desirable occupational outcomes. In contrast, the most widely recognized study of prison management, DiIulio's Governing Prisons, argues for a traditional management style that severely restricts prison employees' influence and control, and embodies a bureaucratic model of organization. This study tests whether, at an organizational level, job control influences prison workers' satisfaction and performance. Results from a study of 73 federal prisons support the model suggested by management studies over DiIulio's traditional model: Job autonomy and participation in decision making are associated with enhanced occupational outcomes including higher job satisfaction, stronger commitment to the institution, greater effectiveness in working with inmates, and less job-related stress.

Prevalence of Tuberculin Skin Test Reactions Among Prison Workers

Prevalence of Tuberculin Skin Test Reactions Among Prison Workers

Prevalence of tuberculin skin test reactions among prison workers.

To determine the prevalence of positive tuberculin skin test (TST) reactions (10 mm or greater) among full-time employees of a provincial prison for women in Montreal. Participants underwent tuberculin skin testing and completed a self-administered questionnaire. Among 129 employees identified, 118 (91%) underwent tuberculin testing. Among 102 born in Quebec who completed the questionnaire, 33 (32%) had positive TST reactions, including 12 (23%) of 52 subjects who had never been vaccinated. Positive TST reactions were significantly associated in multivariate analysis with BCG vaccination after infancy (OR = 4.5, 95% CI = 1.5-13.5), years of work at other provincial prisons (OR = 2.5 for each 5 years of work, 95% CI = 1.2-5.2), travel to tuberculosis endemic countries (OR = 7.7, 95% CI = 1.4-43), although not with work in the prison for women (OR = 1.3, 95% CI = 0.9-1.9) The prevalence of positive TST reactions was greater among workers at a provincial prison for women than among a sample of students, suggesting increased occupational risk of tuberculosis infection.

Prison deprivation and protein nutritional status of inmates of a developing community prison

OBJECTIVE This study assesses the protein nutritional status of inmates of a small prison, in the light of a changing serum protein pattern in the environment. DESIGN Survey of prison inmates. SETTING A male prison and low social class hospital workers. SUBJECTS 81 inmates and 62 randomly selected controls, of which 42 of the former and 28 of the latter were further randomly selected. METHODS Nutritional and confinement history were obtained by a questionnaire, Weights and heights were measured and serum and urine samples collected for protein estimations. RESULTS The prisoners were confined for 229.1 (SD 210.1) days. 48.1% had BMI < 20 kg/m2 compared to 28.6% of controls (p = 0.04). Their diet was predominantly carbohydrate. Mean total serum protein was 81.5gm/L (6.1) (95% CI = 79.3-83.5) (prisoners); 88.7 gm/L (8.1) (95% CI = 85.7-91.7) (controls). Serum globulin was 44.9 gm/L (6.3) (95% CI = 42.9-46.9) (prisoners); 55.4 gm/L (8.2) (95% CI = 52.3-58.5) (controls) (p <0.001 respectively). More prisoners than controls had severe hypo- albuminaemia (p =0.001). All values were lower in those awaiting trial compared to convicted inmates. Total protein and albumin weakly correlated with duration of confinement (r = -0.23 and -0.15, respectively). CONCLUSION The study suggest that the prisoners might be undernourished with lower serum proteins than controls, within an average of seven months confinement. The picture appears worse in those awaiting trial and with prolonged duration of confinement.

The Reproduction of Social Control: A Study of Prison Workers at San Quentin.

Introduction: Working in the Pen Elements of the Worldview Intersections of Interests: Relations with Prisoners Relations Among Workers Toward a New Typology The Reproduction of Social Control: The Worldview of the Prison Worker Discarded Images: A Literature Review

Book Review: The Reproduction of Social Control: A Study of Prison Workers at San Quentin

Book Review: The Reproduction of Social Control: A Study of Prison Workers at San Quentin