Researchers seeking to understand less common reasons that people are drawn to work as correctional officers surveyed officers who were in training but had not yet started work. They found a small subset of correctional officers whose reasons the researchers describe as “nefarious and disconcerting.” These reasons included the opportunity to use force against and punish offenders. Researchers cautioned against generalizing this research, which only looked at three states and focused on a small number of officers, to the wider population of correctional officers in the U.S. Previous research has shown that most officers are primarily drawn to the job by pay and benefits.
The research article, Nefarious and Disconcerting Motivations for Choosing a Correctional Officer Position: A Deviant Case Analysis, was published in Criminal Justice and Behavior.
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As a Research Short, this article only covered some of the most important findings of this research, but could not dig deeper into other elements, such as its methods or limitations. If you’d like to know more about the research, let me know in the comments.
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I’m going to publish a version of this article (revised, but essentially the same piece) in True Crime Adjacent ̶o̶n̶ ̶M̶o̶n̶d̶a̶y̶ later today.