A Qualitative Study About Assessing The Needs and Sources of Spiritual Support of Correctional Officers

Prisons are places where the penalties of the offenders are executed. Correctional officers work in these institutions. It is their task to take care of prisoners one on one, providing their necessaties and helping them in their socializing process. They work in shifts for low salaries. Their psychology are easly affected because of working with problematic people who have committet crime in their past, inefecient income, irregular working hours, and institunianol problems such as dark, gloomy workplace due to safety concern.

It is their duty to contribute or personally implement the imperative activities given by their job description. Convicts might be people with a past of involvement in violence, rape, murder, drug dealing or many other types of corruption. Correctional officers easily might be affected by their attitudes. The process that begins with enstrangement from the workplace are followed by many negative thoughts and attitudes toward their professions. Stress, burnout syndrome, anxiety, depression, tiredness, boredom, cynicism, staleness, insecurity, depression, insignificance, feeling of failure are emotions a correctional officers might face every day in their pesonal life. Psycological processes such as these, are often observed in professionals like health workers (medical doctor, nurse etc.), psychiatrists, workers of special educational institutions as correctional officers and they show a decrease in their productivity and devotion to their workplace as well as their quality of life.

There are many negative or positive ways for coping with problems related to workplace. The positive ones are focused on solving or reducing the effects of the problem. Negative solutions are more based of ignoring the problem. A negative attitude towards problems is not based on hindering it, on the contrary, showing emotions motivated by avoidance. Negative psychological processes such as burnout, anxiety, depression help the person to have space between himself and the problem. Even the person would be taken away from the problems by this kind of emotions, they don’t remove the facts from one’s life. So the negative psychological processes don’t disappear but just being ignored by the person.

Coping with workplace problems for professionals, increase their affection towards their work, foster their productivity and motivation. Numbers of national and international studies offer a variety of organizational, social or personal support programs in order to enhance, the capacity of their coping with problems, quality of life and productivity by a symultanious implementation. Among the solutions we find, improvement of the physical environment, uplifting of the salary, bettering the aspect of the society towards corrective officers as programs to reduce the effects of stress and psychological wellbeing improving programs. Burnout appears to be the emotion that is the most necessary to be worked on among all the negative feelings, thoughts and attitudes. Spiritulity has been observed with important contributions for depersonalizing of burnout syndrome. The burnout syndrome may cause serious effects to correctional officers physical, mental health. Correctional officers lose the ability to adapt to their work, they may display negative attitudes toward their job and co-workers. Three burnout symptoms are: “exhaustion, depersonalization, and to feel reduced personal accomplishment”. Exhaustion is generalized fatigue that can be related to devoting effort to a work that is not perceived to be beneficial. Depersonalization is an indifferent and distant attitude towards work. Depersonalization shows itself as negative, cynical and insensible behaviors. Reduced personal accomplishment is to negatively evaluate the worth of one’s own work and to feel insufficient to perform one’s job, and generalized weak self-esteem.

Sprituality has ben catogorizied under four different types. One is showing great affection towards humanity; second one is finding connections between the person and nature, third is feeling to be a part of the complete universe, while the fourth one is finding ties between the person himself with the Creator.

People who have spiritual-religious values show greater strength against fighting stress. People with spiritual-religious values demonstrate greater resistance against stress. Recent studies on work spirituaity have shown the importance of spiritual values in work satisfaction. Studies observed that religious-spiritual values such as prayer help OC’s to cope with negative thoughts and emotions and depersonalizing burnour syndrome.

This study investigates the CO’s how they percive the problems, the ways they handle them, spiritual sources they depend on and their need of spiritual support. 10 CO’s have been interviewed for the qualitative study. According to the outcomes CO’s face negative thoughts and emotions caused by the work conditions. Our findings demonstrate negative coping ways such as burnout, stress, anger, towards the problems.

On the other hand, practicing of prayers and having faith in God, finding meaning and purpose in every asset and happening are positive ways of coping with problems. The CO’s who exercise their correctional duties under the religious understanding of “helping others and recommend the good” do have more positive thoughts compared to their colleagues. And other important finding appeared that spiritual support is necessary for CO’s for their own wellbeing.

Based on these findings, the study underlines the importance of preparation of spiritual support programs based on the necessities of CO’s focused on the ideas “forgiveness and anger management is a virtuous attitude”