Elevating the Rehabilitation Orientations of the Correctional Officer Workforce: Implications for Recruitment and Hiring Practices

ABSTRACT

Due to their close proximity to those serving time, correctional officers may not only be agents of control but also agents of change. Although state departments of correction often target for recruitment those individuals who can fulfill the custodial role of the job, little attention is given to hiring a human service-oriented workforce. To fill that void, we surveyed 673 newly hired correctional officer trainees from three states to determine the extent and sources of their embracement of a rehabilitative orientation. Our findings provide insight for departments of correction concerning the potential facilitators and inhibitors of achieving their rehabilitative mission.

Keywords:

• Corrections Officers
• Rehabilitation
• Staffing
• Prisons

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All the models were assessed for multicollinearity. All variance inflation factors were less than 1.50 and no independent variables shared a correlation above .50. Thus, multicollinearity is not an issue in our models (Weisburd & Britt, 2014).

2. As noted, some of the variables in our models only achieved statistical significance in one of our regional sub-samples, but not in the other regional sub-sample (e.g., military experience was negatively related to endorsement of the rehabilitation orientation among Southern officers but unrelated with Midwestern officers). It is unclear why this is the case and goes beyond the scope of our data to make such assumptions. However, that these findings were observed points to the notion that individual state departments might caution against making comparisons between their state and national-level trends and instead, focus primarily on other states within their region.