Psychosocial risks within prison service

Abstract

We aimed to identify the psychosocial risks that penitentiary police officers face. To do so, we developed the police stress risk questionnaire–prison (PSrQ–p), a questionnaire for psychosocial risk assessment at workplace, consisting of 22 items that investigated five macro dimensions: isolation, social image, firearms license, variety of work and roles/responsibilities. We tested this tool on a sample of 1,346 subjects, and testing is on-going. From the data obtained, we confirmed the hypothesis of psychophysical and negative social image relative to the isolation experienced by penitentiary police officers.

Keywords

• Psychosocial factors; police officers; prisons; social environment