The Impact of Punishment and Rehabilitation Views on Organizational Commitment Among Correctional Staff: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

It has been long recognized that organizational commitment is an important component of effective organizations. It has, however, received relatively little attention in the correctional literature. Furthermore, much of the research to date on correctional orientation has focused on examining how various forces affect the punishment and rehabilitation views of correctional employees, but ignored how these views affect employees' organizational commitment. Using a data set collected from 272 staff members at a Midwestern, high security state prison, this study examined the impact of punishment and rehabilitation views on organizational commitment. It was found that support for rehabilitation was associated with higher levels of organizational commitment while support for punishment was related with lower levels of organizational commitment.

The impact of job stress, job involvement, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment on correctional staff support for rehabilitation and punishment

“…Only one published study could be located that examined the relationship between organizational commitment and support for punishment and support for rehabilitation. In a study of Midwestern correctional staff, the impact of role stress, job variety, perceived dangerousness of the job, supervision consideration, work-family conflict, support for treatment, and support for punishment on organizational commitment was estimated (Lambert, Hogan, Barton, Jiang, & Baker, 2008). Support for rehabilitation had a positive impact on organizational commitment, while support for punishment had a negative effect.…”

Inmate Rehabilitation Revisited: Using Goffman and Perrow to Explain Constraints on Transformational Technologies in Prison

“…To clarify this confusion would take, on the micro level, a redefinition of the COs' role and job description. This would be easy enough to accomplish if COs were willing to cooperate and prison administrations gave their organizational commitment (Lambert, Hogan, Barton, Jiang, & Baker, 2008). The technology is certainly available to teach them.…”

“…One is the continued application of the decentralized, Unit Management, prison-management model (Farmer, 2012) that serves both a control and rehabilitative function. The other hope is in the hiring of staff who support rehabilitation (Lambert et al, 2008).…”

“…Presently there is a mutual lack of respect between inmates and COs which hinders communication and the willingness to listen. This is going to require a change in thinking and a change in CO recruitment (Lambert et al, 2008) and training. Therapeutic skills are easy enough to teach, but the difficulty would be in training the CO to behave in both custodial and rehabilitative ways at the same time; to be able to adjust into either of these modes at will.…”

“…They would also have to start being rewarded for ISSN 2329-9150 2014 their listening and communicating with inmates. This, in turn, could result in more staff commitment to the prison organization (Lambert et al, 2008). Right now, they are only trained and rewarded for their control behavior (Clear et al, 2012), and since this pits them against the inmates who are also looking for control, a struggle for control exists and this reinforces a lack of communication (Perrow, 1958).…”