Correctional Officer Stress: A Phenomenological Study

Abstract

Stress at work is a significant problem and a prerequisite for worsening personal well-being and working performance. The responsibilities of correctional officers monitoring offenders involve substantial stress, and the consequences include a deterioration in mental and physical health to a decrease in life expectancy. The researchers’ attention to the problem has recently appeared, and practical solutions have not yet been developed due to insufficient knowledge. Moreover, the activities aimed to help correctional officers faces various obstacles as the stigma of mental health care. However, increasing resilience is known to help manage stress at work. The current study seeks to expand existing knowledge about the stress of correctional officers. An interview was conducted within the qualitative phenomenological research design to better disclose the employees’ experiences.

Summary

Correctional institutions aim to prevent crimes and punish and rehabilitate criminals for the safety of society. The penitentiary staff is responsible for supervising more than 4.5 million criminals across the country (Rhineberger-Dunn & Mack, 2019). The duties of officers in correctional facilities involve significant risks and burdens. Personnel must provide the security, humane treatment, and reliability of jails and prisons. Such circumstances provoke stress, which can harm employees and the quality of their work. The current study aims to explore the experience and understand the stress of correctional officers in Pennsylvania. Understanding the problem and drawing attention to the problem is crucial to improving officers’ situations. It is essential to know if staff can cope with the rising tension and what measures can help with this issue. A phenomenological approach will help uncover officers’ points of view, describe working conditions that contribute to stress and explore its consequences and prevention opportunities.

Problem Statement

Support for correctional officers is essential to keep the country safe since confinement places are necessary to prevent crime. These employees work under challenging conditions controlling criminals and guarding in order to provide security for the population. In their professional activity, officers need to establish clear boundaries in relations with colleagues and wards and maintain control and discipline without showing cruelty. At the same time, officers are constantly at risk of having an injury and should be extremely careful (Goulette et al., 2022). Moreover, unique working conditions complicate the separation of the profession from personal life, negatively affecting it (Vickovic & Morrow, 2020). Consequently, staff experiences high levels of stress, which harms their physical and mental health, creating the potential for performance decrease and reduced safety. Understanding the stressful experience of officers is necessary to find and implement solutions to reduce stress and improve working conditions.

Despite the increasing acknowledgment of the significance of mental health support and stress prevention, this area is still stigmatized. Stress may not be seen as a significant problem by part of society, but it carries many adverse effects. Moreover, officers’ positions provide for rigor, discipline, and strength, and issues related to mental health may seem to employees an inappropriate weakness (Johnston et al., 2022). Such circumstances create additional tension, deepening stress, and its consequences. Considering that workers can avoid the effects of stress, misunderstanding its signs and lack of prevention measures can only worsen the situation. Recognizing the problem’s presence, influence, and the importance of interventions is necessary to protect officers and society.

Purpose Statement

The study aims to examine the stressful experience of correctional officers in Pennsylvania, how it affects their life and professional duties and whether employees are taking any measures to improve their well-being. Several different factors can lead to stress, and it is essential to understand which ones have the most impact. Such knowledge will provide the basis for developing solutions to reduce officer stress. Moreover, studying the personal experience of a correctional employee is crucial to deepening knowledge about the effects of stress. Understanding how constant tension affects an employee’s life through personal stories draws attention to the problem, which contributes to the intensification of intervention development.

Current literature on the issue demonstrates the severity of the stress impact and the lack of effective interventions. Therefore, the present study also seeks to investigate officers’ experience in reducing tension and preventing stress. It is necessary to understand whether correctional officers are aware of maintaining their mental well-being. If interviewees were participants in any interventions, received mental health training, or took any action on their own, it is essential to know what measures they consider adequate. The experiences and preferences of the study population are critical to consider when developing any interventions.

Hypothesis

The study expands existing research on the stress of correctional officers by providing a deep insight into their experience. In particular, the study considers the prevalence and causes of stress, its impact, and measures to reduce exposure. The following hypotheses are tested:

• Hypothesis 1. Correctional officers are highly stressed due to the danger of their work, the need for strict surveillance of criminals, and multiple duties.
• Hypothesis 2. Correctional officers feel constant fatigue and tension due to stress, which impairs their health, well-being, personal life, and performance of duties.
• Hypothesis 3. A few officers are worried about supporting their mental health and coping with stress, consider seeking help a weakness, and do not take any measures to keep their resilience.

Definitions and Literature Review

The study focuses on correctional officers and the stress they experience at work and requires an initial explanation and presentation of some ideas related to the issue. Correctional officers are employees who oversee arrested people who are awaiting trial or sentenced to prison. Workplace stress is the occurrence of feelings of tension, frustration, and psychological hardness caused by work circumstances (Lambert et al., 2020). A critical and discussed concept in the study of stress is resilience, which implies a personal ability to maintain regular physical and mental functioning in adverse situations (Klinoff et al., 2018). Three key areas can be distinguished in recent literature on stress in correctional officers. They include causes, predictors, consequences, and possible preventive measures and interventions.

Stress Causes and Predictors

The researchers highlight several influential factors in the work environment by looking at the causes of stress and the difficulties associated with the peculiarities of correctional institutions. Lambert et al. (2020) focused on considering officers’ roles, supervision, decision participation, training, and instrumental communication. After surveying personnel at a large American prison, the authors found that the most influential factor is role overload, that is, performing a large number of tasks in a short time with insufficient resources (Lambert et al., 2020). Another influential factor is the fear of victimization and injury, which is consistent with a study by Goulette et al. (2022), arguing that injuries are an impactful cause of stress. Lambert et al. (2020) did not find that other factors were equally significant stress causes. The study results show what conditions in the working environment of correctional officers require initial attention.

The roles performed by correctional officers at work, their features, and their impact on stress were also investigated by other researchers. Rhineberger-Dunn and Mack (2019), during an anonymous online survey, found out which of the three possible stressors related to roles – conflict, ambiguity, and overload – can cause stress. Their result is consistent with Lambert et al. (2020), demonstrating that role overload is the most influential and the other factors studied are not equally significant. Such results surprised the researchers, as the assumptions of both studies included the possibility of an influence of the role’s ambiguity.

The professional activities of any person also impact the personal life, and sometimes the job’s negative aspects penetrate the officer’s life, creating conflict and causing stress. Vickovic and Morrow (2020) found that the conflict between family and work caused by tension is significant for stress. The conflict situation and other factors create pressure on officers, interfering with the performance of duties. Thus, various studies distinguished three main factors contributing to correctional officers’ stress, and their results are consistent – role overload, risk of injuries, and tension.

Stress Consequences

The impact of stress cannot be underestimated, and in the case of correctional officers, the complexities of their work affect not only their personal life, which was already mentioned but also their health and personality. Lambert et al. (2020) argue that stress leads to substance abuse, reduced life satisfaction, and physical and mental health risks. Moreover, the average life expectancy of correctional officers is 59 years, which is 16 years less than the average in the United States (Lambert et al., 2020). Such consequences are unacceptable, and therefore the problem requires immediate intervention.

Stress is also a significant obstacle in the performance of job duties. The effects on work include burnout, reduced activity satisfaction, less commitment to the organization, and high rates of quitting the job (Suliman & Einat, 2018). Burnout, which involves discouragement or depression and the inability to carry out ordinary activities, is one of the most common consequences and often leads to layoffs. In facilities that do not support their employees, this phenomenon leads to high staff turnover and increased costs for finding and training new personnel. As a result, stress poses a severe danger to officers, their lives, work, and the public’s safety.

Over time, correctional officers’ work and the stress accompanying it also affect their personalities. Suliman and Einat (2018) conducted a longitudinal study comparing the personal characteristics of employees over three years. Over this time, correctional employees’ neuroticism level has significantly increased, which changed their personalities (Suliman & Einat, 2018). Such changes bring additional risks to emotional resilience and mental health. Such an assumption can be supported by a study by Jaegers et al. (2020), which demonstrates that the prevalence of depression and stress among correctional officers is about 31%, with 9% – in the whole population. The personality changes that correctional officers undergo in stressful working conditions make them more psychologically unstable.

Stress can have different effects on employees depending on their resilience. Studies prove that such qualities of correctional officers as optimism and hope and the presence of social support, contribute to resilience and, as a result, resistance to stressors (Klinoff et al., 2018). Another study conducted by Williams (2018) confirms that mentioned qualities and spirituality prevent burnout and maintain resilience. The results of such research are valuable in the development and implementation of solutions to the problem.

Interventions

Given the severity of the effects of stress and its prevalence, it is essential to search for methods to prevent or reduce its impact. The researchers have concluded that the interventions taken so far do not have the proper effect (Evers et al., 2020; Jessiman-Perreault et al., 2021). Studies also indicate that the problem of stress in correctional workers has only recently begun to attract attention. Moreover, the studies on interventions were often inconsistent and used weak methods (Evers et al., 2020). The issue’s poor understanding may be the reason for the inefficiency of existing measures. The development of studies and interventions with more robust methodologies to produce results is needed.

In addition to weak methodology, interventions to prevent the effects of stress on correctional officers face additional challenges. In particular, mental health care is often accompanied by public stigma. Such a problem is especially relevant for correctional officers, whose work is accompanied by an image of rigor and strength. In this case, the search for psychological help may seem like a sign of weakness or laziness inappropriate to the position (Johnston et al., 2022). Thus, effective interventions aimed at supporting the well-being of correctional officers and protecting against the effects of stress have not yet been developed due to existing problems and obstacles.

However, it is worth noting that researchers highlight factors that help reduce stress. For example, Lambert et al. (2020) found that employees’ contribution to decision-making, a sense of own value and influence, provides a more positive psychological attitude. Another factor that reduces work stress is quality supervision, which helps understand and fulfill work requirements better (Lambert et al., 2020). Such conclusions can be reliance in the development and implementation of solutions to the problem.

Research Methods/Design

The current study follows a qualitative design and uses a phenomenological approach to describe the experience of correctional officers under stress. Qualitative methodology is aimed at obtaining and analyzing non-quantitative data. Such a design allows researchers to deeply explore a specific topic, especially a person’s point of view, which ensures their greater understanding. Moreover, qualitative research provides many details, and the disclosure of human experience can influence attention to specific issues. However, when analyzing the obtained data in qualitative studies, it is crucial to consider their subjectivity, which significantly impacts the investigator’s conclusions.

As one of the types of data collection and analysis in qualitative studies, phenomenology focuses on revealing the experience associated with some subject, situation, event, or aspect of a person’s life. Phenomenological studies aim to obtain clear and accurate descriptions of specific phenomena in human life (Tomaszewski et al., 2020). This approach is appropriate for studying the features of stress as a phenomenon that the study’s target population, correctional officers, is feeling.

The phenomenological approach has certain features when applied to research. In particular, the target audience is usually people who have lived through a specific phenomenon. For the current study, the target sample is corrective officers who have experienced stress. Data collection in the phenomenological approach occurs through interviews, focus group meetings, observation, or the study of documents, such as diaries (Tomaszewski et al., 2020). The interview is a suitable method for the purposes set in the current study. Phenomenological analysis of the data provides for their careful exploration, identification of passages related to the studied phenomenon, determination of central topics, and then identifying the phenomenon’s essence (Tomaszewski et al., 2020). Transcripts of interviews with officers will be data sources to examine their stress experiences. Thus, the phenomenological approach is suitable for revealing the topic under study.

References

Evers, T. J., Ogloff, J. R. P., Trounson, J. S., & Pfeifer, J. E. (2020). Well-being interventions for correctional officers in a prison setting: A review and meta-analysis. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 47(1), 3-21.

Goulette, N., Denney, A. S., Crow, M. S., & Ferdik, F. V. (2022). “Anything can happen at any time”: Perceived causes of correctional officer injuries. Criminal Justice Review, 47(1), 17-33.

Jaegers, L. A., Matthieu, M. M., Werth, P., Ahmad, S. O., Barnidge, E., & Vaughn, M. G. (2020). Stressed out: Predictors of depression among jail officers and deputies. The Prison Journal, 100(2), 240-261.

Jessiman-Perreault, G., Smith, P. M., & Gignac, M. A. (2021). Why are workplace social support programs not improving the mental health of Canadian correctional officers? An examination of the theoretical concepts underpinning support. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(5), 1-11.

Johnston, M. S., Ricciardelli, R., & McKendy, L. (2022). Improving the mental health of correctional workers: Perspectives from the field. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 1-20.

Klinoff, V. A., Van Hasselt, V. B., Black, R. A., Masias, E. V., & Couwels, J. (2018). The assessment of resilience and burnout in correctional officers. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 45(8), 1213-1233.

Lambert, E. G., Keena, L. D., Haynes, S. H., May, D., & Leone, M. C. (2020). Predictors of job stress among Southern correctional staff. Criminal Justice Policy Review, 31(2), 309-331.

Rhineberger-Dunn, G., & Mack, K. Y. (2019). Impact of workplace factors on role-related stressors and job stress among community corrections staff. Criminal Justice Policy Review, 30(8), 1204-1228.

Suliman, N., & Einat, T. (2018). Does work stress change personalities? Working in prison as a personality-changing factor among correctional officers. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 45(5), 628-643.

Tomaszewski, L. E., Zarestky, J., & Gonzalez, E. (2020). Planning qualitative research: Design and decision making for new researchers. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 19, 1-7.

Vickovic, S. G., & Morrow, W. J. (2020). Examining the influence of work-family conflict on job stress, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment among correctional officers. Criminal Justice Review, 45(1), 5-25.

Williams, G. (2018). Resisting burnout: Correctional staff spirituality and resilience. Revista de Fomento Social, 73(3-4), 617-647.

Appendix A

Interview Questions

• How long are you a correctional officer? How much has your life and you changed during this time?
• Please describe your typical working day – what do you do, and what do you think about it?
• What kind of training did you receive before working as a correctional officer?
• Did the training meet the actual responsibilities, or were you disoriented on the first days of work?
• Did the preparation include the psychological aspect of the work?
• What is your mood during the day, and what factors affect it the most?
• How do you assess your health and well-being and their changes during the time of working correctional officer?
• Do you find your job to be difficult and stressful?
• During the working day, do you constantly remain in intense attention?
• What was the most stressful situation at work, and how did you cope?
• Were you in situations where stress led to mistakes at work?
• Do you feel vulnerable or see threats to your life at work?
• What feelings do you have after the end of the working day?
• Please describe your tiredness after work – how is fatigue manifested?
• Do you have harmful habits? Which ones? Do they intensify after a working day?
• What measures do you take to reduce stress at work and in life?
• How do you rest after a working day? Are your recovering enough to start the next one?
• What impact does your work have on your personal life?
• Are you discussing your work and its impact on your life with loved ones or friends?