The Role of Prison Climate and Work Climate in Understanding Subjective Safety Among Correctional Staff

• Author: Hanneke Palmen,Miranda Sentse,Esther F. J. C. Van Ginneken,Anouk Q. Bosma
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00938548221087180
• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Date: 01 November 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, 2022, Vol. 49, No. 11, November 2022, 1580 –1599.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00938548221087180

Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions

© 2022 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology

1580

THE ROLE OF PRISON CLIMATE AND WORK

CLIMATE IN UNDERSTANDING SUBJECTIVE

SAFETY AMONG CORRECTIONAL STAFF

HANNEKE PALMEN

MIRANDA SENTSE

ESTHER F. J. C. VAN GINNEKEN

ANOUK Q. BOSMA

Leiden University

To perform their work effectively, correctional officers should feel safe. Yet, research explaining officers’ subjective safety is

scarce and overlooked the context in which these feelings arise. This study explores the impact of shared perceptions of prison

climate and work climate. Survey and administrative data of incarcerated individuals and staff from the Dutch Life in

Custody Study were used. Multilevel analyses on 1,427 correctional officers (135 prison units) showed that (a) almost 20%

of the variance in officers’ subjective safety was clustered at the prison unit level; (b) both prison climate (satisfaction with

activities and visits, relations with peers, and meaningful activities) and work climate factors (organizational satisfaction and

workload) contributed to officers’ safety; (c) the relative importance of work climate was high in comparison to prison cli-

mate. These findings indicate that officers’ subjective safety is to a substantial extent a matter of climate rather than an

individual trait.

Keywords: subjective safety; prison; correctional officers; multilevel analysis; work climate; prison climate

INTRODUCTION

Although working in a prison context inevitably comprises certain levels of risk (see

Ferdik & Smith, 2017, for an overview), feeling safe at work is very important for correc-

tional officers. Besides more objective aspects of safety—such as contraband presence,

incident rates, or severity of prison population—correctional officers’ subjective safety,1

that is, the degree to which they feel safe, has been found to affect prison life in multiple

ways. Low levels of subjective safety among correctional officers have been related to men-

tal health problems, such as stress and burn-out (Garcia, 2008; Lambert, Minor, et al., 2018),

lower levels of job satisfaction (Garcia, 2008), higher levels of absenteeism (Lambert et al.,

AUTHORS’ NOTE: The authors wish to thank the Dutch Custodial Institutions Agency (DJI) for their sup-

port with the administration of the survey. The opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this article

are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the DJI. The Life in Custody study was funded

by the DJI and Leiden University. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Hanneke

Palmen, Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9520, Leiden 2300 RA, The

Netherlands; e-mail: j.m.h.palmen@law.leidenuniv.nl.

1087180CJBXXX10.1177/00938548221087180Criminal Justice and BehaviorPalmen et al. / SUBJECTIVE SAFETY OF CORRECTIONAL STAFF

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Palmen et al. / SUBJECTIVE SAFETY OF CORRECTIONAL STAFF 1581

2010), and higher turnover rates (Ferdik et al., 2014). Moreover, feeling unsafe might lead

to mismanagement of the prison population, given that fear of victimization has been linked

to a more punitive professional orientation, an increased eagerness to use force (Griffin,

2002; Haynes et al., 2020), more hostile interactions, and less contact between incarcerated

individuals and officers (Gordon et al., 2003, 2013). It, thus, seems of great importance for

incarcerated individuals, correctional staff, and management to create a work environment

in which correctional officers feel safe while performing their duties.

To be able to create a safe work environment, it is important to know what factors can

undermine subjective safety of correctional officers. Given the apparent relevance of this

topic for correctional facilities, surprisingly little research has been done in this area. A

recent systematic and meta-analytic review of the literature on correctional officers showed

that previous research has been dominated by studies that focused on job satisfaction, job

stress, and organizational commitment (Butler et al., 2019). This has left other important

issues, including the subjective safety of correctional officers, understudied. Moreover, the

majority of studies that did address the safety of correctional officers focused on the conse-

quences of feeling unsafe; few studies examined what exactly constitutes a safe work envi-

ronment for correctional officers (Butler et al., 2019).

The small body of research that did address the determinants of subjective safety of cor-

rectional officers typically focused on individual characteristics of correctional officers

(e.g., age, education level) and individual perceptions and objective characteristics of the

workplace (e.g., relationship with supervisor, type of shift or security level, respectively).

These studies show that perceptions and characteristics of the workplace seem more rele-

vant than individual characteristics of employees in explaining differences in subjective

safety (e.g., Lai et al., 2012; Lambert, Gordon, et al., 2018). However, due to the great

variety in concepts and measures applied in this body of research, findings have not always

been replicated across studies yet, which calls for a careful interpretation of previous find-

ings. Furthermore, statistical models in these studies generally explain a modest amount of

the variance, indicating that our knowledge of the determinants of subjective safety of cor-

rectional officers is still lacking.

To advance our understanding of the determinants of subjective safety among correc-

tional officers, the current study builds on two recent findings in prison research: (a) the

way correctional officers experience their work environment is interrelated with the way

incarcerated individuals experience their living conditions (Van Ginneken et al., 2020), and

(b) although large individual variations exist in perceptions of prison climate, there is also

a significant portion of perceptual agreement about prison conditions among individuals

who share the same environment (Van Ginneken & Nieuwbeerta, 2020). This means that

individuals in the same unit and the same prison are more similar in terms of their percep-

tions of work conditions and living conditions than individuals in different units and pris-

ons. As a consequence, a focus on shared perceptions of the environment is needed to best

capture the prison climate and work climate. In sum, we aim to explore the relative contri-

bution of prison climate and work climate in the prediction of correctional officers’ feelings

of safety. In the following sections, we will clarify how we conceptualize the proposed

concepts of prison climate and work climate, and by referring to previous research we illus-

trate how a focus on shared perceptions may lead to new insights for understanding the

subjective safety of correctional officers.