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Abstract
Although a review of literature related to turnover intent in the correctional workplace has focused primarily on prison officers, jailers have frequently been overlooked. Specifically, a comparison between jail and prison officers’ perceptions in Taiwan is limited. In order to fill the gap, our study was based on three objectives: (1) surveying Taiwanese correctional officers who experienced the “get-tough-on-crime” policy during the early 2000s, (2) testing for differences in turnover intent between jail and prison officers, and (3) examining personal and workplace environmental factors in order to determine whether distinct turnover intent exists among prison and jail officers. A self-report survey administered to 799 Taiwanese correctional officers (with an adjusted response rate of 89%) demonstrated that jail and prison officers had moderately high levels of turnover intent with no significant difference. When turnover intent correlates were further examined, job dangerousness, organizational harmony, and commitment were significant predictors for both prison and jail officers, thus suggesting that environmental factors have the most robust impact. In terms of personal characteristics, tenure and position were significantly related to prison officers’ turnover intent. Conversely, age represented the significant factor among jail respondents.
Notes
This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Corrigendum (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01924036.2012.750038).
1. In Taiwanese correctional facilities, both line personnel and non-line personnel are assigned to custodial divisions. While line personnel refer to uniformed officers who guard inmates in cells, medical units, workshops, counseling rooms, and visitation areas, non-line personnel refer to uniformed officers who do not always perform these duties. Normally, line personnel include rookies, whereas non-line personnel consist of sergeants, lieutenants, and captains who have attained longer tenure. Although researchers have argued that non-line personnel should be grouped into a supervisory position, the non-line personnel in our study were not equivalent to supervisors.
2. Although the relationship between victimization experiences and turnover intent were briefly discussed, two reasons that justify victimization are offered. First, victimization among Taiwanese correctional officers is getting worse. For example, Lai, Wang, and Kellar (Citation2012) found that only 28.2% of respondents reported that they had encountered physical victimization in their Taiwanese correctional settings based on a survey conducted in 2006. In our current study, approximately 40.1% of respondents reported that they had been victimized over the past 12 months prior to our 2011 survey. Second, Pearson's r correlation matrix results indicated that victimization and dangerousness had a higher association (r = 0.27, p < 0.01), suggesting that negative workplace attitudes really matter when explaining turnover intent among correctional officers (Lambert et al., Citation2001). Accordingly, victimization was treated as an exploratory variable used to predict turnover intent among correctional officers.