Mental health and work absenteeism among Chilean prison officers

Prison officers play a crucial role in the precarious prison systems of Latin America, even though their working conditions and the implications of these on their mental health and absenteeism have been scarcely studied.

This article analyses, from a mainly quantitative perspective, the situation of mental health and absenteeism in a sample of Chilean prison officers in 20 prisons throughout the country.

We used a methodological combination that included: the application of the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) instrument, applied to a simple random sample of 1,171 prison officers belonging to 20 prisons throughout Chile; the Staff Quality of Life (SQL) questionnaire in the same sample; and administrative data on absenteeism (sick leave) provided by the Chilean prison service (Gendarmerie), in order to describe the magnitude of the phenomenon in the country's prisons. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, bivariate analysis, and multiple linear regression modeling.

Our main conclusion is that prison officers present significant deterioration in their physical and mental health, which was observed both in the high rates of absenteeism from work (sick leave), as well as in the high percentages of officers reporting the presence of some psychopathology, according to the GHQ-12, far exceeding figures obtained in the general Chilean population.