The CORRECTIONAL Orientation and Role Conflict of Correctional Officers

Purpose: The recent correctional administration emphasizes not only aspects of detention-security focused on the execution of prisoners in the past but also the rehabilitation ideology through personality education. A cor-rectional officer who must pursue these two conflicting ideologies at the same time has no choice but to feel a role conflict. Therefore, the focus of this study is to examine role conflicts based on the contradictory role expec-tations of “punishment ideology” and “rehabilitation ideology” required of correctional officers from the per-spective of role conflicts. Method: This study is based on a survey that targeted 431 current correctional officers and the collected questionaries were analyzed by the statistics program of SPSS 22.0. For specific research methods, factor analysis, reliability analysis and correlation analysis were conducted to verify the reliability and validity of each variable. In addition, ANOVA analysis was conducted for the purpose of proving the research hypothesis to verify the dif-ferences in the correctional concepts and role conflicts by the socio-demographic characteristics of correctional officers and the differences in role conflicts according to the correctional orientation. Results: Although the punishment orientation of correctional officers differed depending on age, period of service and first department of work, the rehabilitation orientation differed only in the first department of work, this means that the first department of work was the only common link reinforcing either a punishment and rehabilitation ideology. Also, the more the punishment ideology was followed, the greater the chance that role conflict could be experienced. However, there are no difference in role conflicts according to the socio-demo-graphic characteristics, such as gender, age, period of service, current and first department of work. Conclusion: In order to further examine role conflicts of correctional officers, various approaches such as in-depth interviews and panel research will be required. It is also necessary to study various forms of organizational culture to reduce the role conflicts of correctional officers and to efficiently accept contradictory ideologies of punishment and rehabilitation simultaneously.