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Life satisfaction is a positive overall feeling towards one's life and is an important factor for employees and their employers. There has been little research on life satisfaction of staff working at correctional institutions who play an important security role in the care, custody, and control of offenders. The current study explored how work environment variables are related to correctional staff life satisfaction using the Job Demands-Job Resources Model, which holds that job demands and job resources are two major categories of work environment variables. Job demands cause strain for employees, creating negative outcomes and reducing positive outcomes while job resources result in staff being productive and feeling good, increasing positive outcomes and lowering negative outcomes. The current study focused on the specific job demands of perceiving the job as dangerous, role conflict, role ambiguity, and role overload, and the job resources of instrumental communication, job autonomy, job variety, and quality of training. The data was collected from 160 completed questionnaires from all available full-time staff (N = 200) at a prison in the midwestern part of the United States. Using multivariate regression analysis, it was found that role ambiguity and role overload had negative effects on life satisfaction, and job variety and quality training had positive effects. While the effects of job demand and job resource variables differed depending on the aspect of the work environment being examined, the results overall supported the Job Demands-Job Resources Model in explaining life satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on victimization has progressed dramatically over the last four decades. This research has identified important individual and contextual predictors of both fear and perceived risk. Nevertheless, few studies have examined perceptions of safety among corrections employees. The current study used data from 322 correctional staff working at a large Southern prison to explore personal and workplace predictors of perceived safety. Specifically, it examined the effects of personal and workplace variables on three measures of perceived safety: perceived dangerousness of the job, concerns about inmate-on-staff physical assault, and concerns about inmates verbally assaulting staff. Across all three measures of perceived safety, workplace characteristics mattered more than personal characteristics. The personal and workplace variables were grouped into fear facilitators (i.e., variables that increase perceptions of one's safety being at risk) and fear inhibitors (i.e., variables that decrease perceptions of one's safety being at risk). Gender, age, and organizational climate (i.e., disobedient inmates, unethical staff behaviors, role ambiguity, and overload) represented fear facilitators and social support (i.e., support from coworkers, supervisors, and home), quality training, and input into decision-making represented fear inhibitors. In the current study both fear facilitators and fear inhibitors were important, but the nature of their effects differed depending on the employee's position and the type of perceived safety under consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the relationship of organizational commitment with job burnout in the correctional institution setting. Participants were 272 corrections employees at a maximum security state prison housing approximately 1000 male felony offenders. Participants completed survey instruments measuring the emotional exhaustion dimension of burnout and three primary forms of organizational commitment (affective, moral, and continuance). Results support the study's predictions of a negative relationship between burnout and affective commitment, and a positive relationship between burnout and continuance commitment. No significant relationship was found between moral commitment and emotional burnout. While no personal variables were related to burnout, the three forms of organizational commitment accounted for 22% of the burnout variance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]