Hi,
I am looking for a measure of attitudes towards violent and aggressive incidents in prison, which could be used for both prisoners and prison officers.
I am familiar with the management of violence and aggression attitudes scale (MAVAS), designed to measure such attitudes for patients and nurses in psychiatric inpatient units. While it has been used in some forensic inpatient populations, to my knowledge it has not been applied to a prison population - and to do so would require a revised measure, as some sub-scales of the MAVAS (e.g. sttitudes towards medication) would not necessarily be applicable to a prison setting.
So, I am looking for a similar scale which would measure prisoner and prison officer attitudes towards the contributing factors and management of violent and aggressive incidents in prison.
I am happy to receive any recommendations.
Kind regards,
Orla.
Orla: To my knowledge, there are no studies of the type you describe for correctional officers. There are a few more specific studies examining officer attitudes toward sexual assaults which may (or may not) be useful:
Cook, Carrie L., and Jodi Lane. "Examining differences in attitudes about sexual victimization among a sample of jail officers: The importance of officer gender and perceived inmate characteristics." Criminal Justice Review 37, no. 2 (2012): 191-213.
Cook, Carrie L., and Jodi Lane. "Responding to incidents of sexual victimization in correctional institutions: correctional officer perspectives." International journal of offender therapy and comparative criminology 61, no. 15 (2017): 1651-1681.
Cook, Carrie L., and Jodi Lane. "Blaming the victim: Perceptions about incarcerated sexual assault victim culpability among a sample of jail correctional officers." Victims & Offenders 12, no. 3 (2017): 347-380.
Struckman-Johnson, David, Cindy Struckman-Johnson, Justin D. Kruse, Pamela M. Gross, and Brady J. Sumners. "A Pre-PREA survey of inmate and correctional staff opinions on how to prevent prison sexual assault." The Prison Journal 93, no. 4 (2013): 429-452.
Hello Orla,
While assaults are a reportable KPI in Australian prisons and broken down into the categories of prisoner on prisoner and prisoner on staff, I have to agree with Michael that to my knowledge, no such scale exists to measure attitudes towards aggression and violence in the correctional environment.
Some work has been done in applying the ANCODI hypothesis to prison violence. I will advise if I can find any further details about it.
Regards,
Nathan
Thank you both for your responses to my question. After searching the literature extensively, I agree that there is no existing scale which measures attitudes towards prison violence. I ended up selecting the Maudsley Violence Questionnaire (MVQ). Whilst it does not measure attitudes towards prison violence, it measures cognitions towards violence more generally, and has been validated in forensic and prison populations.
Michael: My current study is not focusing on attitudes towards sexual assault, but those resources look very interesting, and I will keep them in mind for future reference.
Nathan: Thank you for bringing my attention to the ANCODI hypothesis. It is not something I am familiar with, but definitely looks interesting, and I would like to find out more about how it is being applied to prison violence.
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