Life quality and occupational stress in prisons workers

Abstract

The Brazilian penitentiary system has many flaws, which involve the treatment of the prisoners, and also the work situation of the professionals in this setting. This fact led to this investigation, which had as a purpose to identify the presence of stress due to labor activities, assess the quality of life of the workers and correlate the dimensions of quality of life to occupational stress among the prison officers. This is a descriptive, transversal and quantitative research , carried out with  35 workers (70% of the universes ) working in the prison system of the municipality of  Cajazeiras, Paraiba after the approval  of the Research Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Santa Maria (protocol number 815.685). For the data collection the World Health Organization Quality of Life – Bref (WHOQOL-Bref) and the Job Stress Scale (JSS) were used. The data was analyzed through the descriptive and inferential statistics. In the comparison between the quality of life and work-related stress domains, the Friedman test was used and to control the error effect Bonferroni's test was carried out. The results, regarding occupational stress, indicated that the psychological demand was what presented the highest score (3.74) and lack of control over work the lowest one (2.71). The total level of quality of life of the prison officers presented an average of 71.07, with the highest score being for the social domain (76.90 points) and the lowest score for the environmental domain (62.23 points). When correlating the quality of life with stress, there was a negative and significant correlation of the total quality of life with the lack of control over work (ρ = -0.42; p <0.05) and with the total stress (ρ = -0.41; p <0.05) showing that the higher the levels of stress, lower the quality of life level. Despite the quality of life having been adequate, the environmental domain has led to its reduction, as well as the occupational stress, being this factor more affected by the lack of control over work. Interventions in the field of promotion of occupational health and safety, with general improvements in the life and work conditions of the prison agents are suggested.