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The bulk of correctional staff life satisfaction research has focused on staff in Western nations, particularly the United States. The current study examined how workplace variables are related to life satisfaction among Nigerian correctional staff, and it used the Job Demands-Resources Model as a theoretical framework. This model postulates that workplace variables can be broken into job demands and resources. Job demands are workplace variables that cause strain. Job resources are workplace variables that help staff be productive and successful and help buffer job demands. Job demands tend to be associated with negative outcomes, such as job stress, and job resources tend to be associated to positive outcomes, such as life satisfaction. Data for this study came from staff at a prison located in southeast Nigeria. The job demand variables examined were role overload and fear of victimization at work, and the job resource variables were quality of training, job autonomy, and job variety, with the outcome variable being life satisfaction. In a multivariate Ordinary Least Squares regression analysis, fear of victimization had a nonsignificant relationship with life satisfaction, role overload had a negative relationship, and quality training, job autonomy, and job variety each had a positive associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As staff performance is vital to the survival of correctional institutions, much empirical attention has been paid to studying the causes and consequences of their attitudes and behaviors. The current study adds to this body of knowledge by examining the factors that explain three central occupational attitudes--job stress, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. More specifically, using survey data collected from a large county correctional system in Orlando, Florida, this research assesses the impact of key demographic, job, and organizational characteristics within and across jail staff attitudes toward job stress, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. This article finds that the more powerful predictors of each of these attitudes are job and organizational characteristics. Among the dependent variables, job stress has an inverse relationship with job satisfaction, and job satisfaction had a powerful positive association with organizational commitment. Keywords: corrections; jail staff; job stress; job satisfaction; organizational commitment

Prison violence is a concern in many correctional institutions. The systems management approach (i.e., assigning an inmate to a higher security level) is costly While there are many different interventions [...]

The job stress literature for social workers has grown dramatically during the past twenty years, and it has shown that social service workers suffer from a significant amount of stress; however, Work-Family Conflict (WFC) is a stressor which has received little, if any, attention. WFC occurs when problems from work spillover in family life and vice versa, causing conflict. The four main types of WFC are family-based conflict (when problems at home spillover to work), time-based (when time at work takes away from family life), strain-based (when stress and strain from work causes problems at home), and behavior-based (when work roles cause problems at home of when home roles cause problems at work). This study examined the impact of different types of WFC on the job satisfaction and organizational commitment of social and human service workers. A survey of social and human service employees in Northwest Ohio was conducted in the Fall of 2002, and 255 surveys were returned. It was found that time-based conflict and behavior-based conflict had significant effects on job satisfaction, while strain-based conflict, and family-based conflict did not. Only behavior-based conflict had a significant impact on organizational commitment. doi:10.1300/J147v30n03_05 KEYWORDS. Work-family conflict, social workers, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment

Many in academia believe that higher education leads to an increase in tolerance towards individuals who are different. There are some empirical findings to support this premise; however, the impact of higher education on acceptance of homosexuality has not been adequately explored. Gays and lesbians in society face many negative attitudes. Based upon the survey results of 364 students at a Midwestern university, juniors and seniors had statistically significant more positive attitudes towards gays and lesbians than did freshmen and sophomores. Even in multi-variate analysis, upper-level students had more positive views on many of the attitudinal measures. KEYWORDS. Attitudes towards gay and lesbian persons, willingness to extend civil rights to gay and lesbian persons, willingness to socialize with gay and lesbian persons, attitudes of college students

The effects of specific types of substance abuse treatment services on clients remaining arrest free for the year following services is explored. Certain types of community substance abuse treatment services can reduce clients' risk of criminal conduct following treatment.

Treatment Alternatives to Street Crime (TASC) is a national program model that has been proposed as a strategy to address the needs of offenders with substance abuse problems who are under some form of community corrections supervision. Logistic regression analysis of a random subsection of 300 clients discharged from a Northwest Ohio TASC program during calendar year 2000 found that successful completion of TASC was significantly associated with a reduction in rearrest within 12 months following TASC discharge. This effect was seen even after controlling for other factors associated with criminal recidivism, such as age, sex, prior criminal history, and prior alcohol and drug use. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: Website: [c] 2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.] KEYWORDS Treatment Alternatives to Street Crime (TASC), recidivism, adult drug treatment, community substance abuse treatment

Work in corrections is generally seen as a stressful occupation. There has been a fair amount of research to date on the possible causes of stress among correctional staff. Nevertheless, the issue of work-family conflict has not received much attention in the correctional literature. For the present article, a survey of correctional staff at a Midwestern prison was conducted in order to determine the effects of measures for educational level, gender, work position, race, sod supervisory status. Four different forms of work-family conflict were extracted (time-based, strain-based, harm caused by, end family-on-work), end time-based end strain-based were found to be significantly related to personal characteristics. Specific, ally, correctional officers were impacted by work--family conflict more than other staff, as were staff who had less tenure end those without a college degree.

The staff at a county jail in Florida were surveyed concerning their attitudes, experiences, and perceptions about civil liability. Few of the jail staff surveyed reported that they had ever been sued, and the vast majority of those who had been sued were supervisors. The likelihood of being sued increased with tenure. Slightly less than half of the jail staff believed that they had been adequately educated in civil liability or that their department would support them if they were sued in the performance of their duties. The survey found that half of the jail staff supported civil liability against public employees and agencies who harm or violate the civil rights of citizens. Most jail staff did not believe that threats of civil suits hindered their job performance. The study's findings have implications for jail administrations, particularly in terms of the need for staff training on civil liability, and support the need for additional research on jail staff as well as for comparative research on jail staff and police attitudes toward civil liability.

Organizational trust includes both supervisor trust and management trust. Additionally, the three main work attitudes are job involvement, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. The objective of this study was to explore the effects of the two types of trust on the three work attitudes with data from a survey of 255 U.S. social workers. In multivariate ordinary least squares regression, the effects of the two forms of organizational trust varied across the three work attitudes. Only management trust had a significant positive effect on job involvement, while both forms of trust had positive relationships with job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment. For job satisfaction, the effect sizes of both forms of trust were similar; however, for organizational commitment, management trust's effect was far greater than the effects of supervisor trust. The current findings support the overall contention that supervisor and management trust play important roles in shaping social worker job involvement, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment, and they also underscore the need for improving perceptions of supervisor and management trust among social workers. Future longitudinal research will be able to demonstrate the causal process of the effects of trust on the three work attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research examining correctional staff indicates that there are far-reaching negative consequences related to job burnout, including, but not limited to, diminished physical and mental health, increased risk of substance use, and decreased job performance. One area that may contribute to correctional staff job burnout is work–family conflict, which occurs when work and home domains spill into one another, causing conflict and problems. Using a sample of Southern correctional staff, this study investigates whether the four major types of work–family conflict—time-based, strain-based, behavior-based, and family-based—influence the three recognized job burnout dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and feeling ineffective at work. The findings provide partial support for the notion that work–family conflict influences job burnout. These findings are contextualized in previous research with a full discussion of their implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]