Public Safety, Psychological Security: A Practice-Informed Research Study Exploring How California Parole Agents Experience Their Work

Abstract

The maintenance of public “safety and security” drives the functioning of correctional systems, yet rarely addressed are the ways the individuals who work in such systems maintain their own psychological safety and security. In the tradition of practice-informed research, the author designed and implemented an exploratory, qualitative research study of former parole agents (N = 23) that aimed to understand how they experience their work. Findings suggest that parole agents recognized and held a fundamental tension between casework and law enforcement, were regularly exposed to intense affective experiences that influenced their practices, developed characteristic ways of managing the anxieties and stressors in their work, and found organizational dynamics to be sources of strain and sustenance. This article provides an overview of the study design and findings, as well as their implications for social work practice and practice informed research.

KEYWORDS:

• parole agents
• corrections
• vicarious trauma
• practice-informed research
• forensic social work

Notes

¹ The label parolee is inherently problematic. I chose to use it in this article because it is consistent with the language that parole agents use to describe their clientele. A more accurate, albeit more clumsy, descriptor would be individual remanded to parole.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Kita

Elizabeth Kita, PhD, LCSW, is a clinical social worker in practice in San Francisco, CA.