Burnout of Sri Lankan Prison Officers: Exploring the Prevalence and Correlates

Background: High work demands and low work resources predispose employees to occupational burnout. Burnout of Sri Lankan prison officers has not been studied previously. Prison guards and prison rehabilitation officers are the staff categories who come into regular and direct contact with prison inmates. Aim: The study aimed to describe the prevalence of burnout and its three sub-domains in Sri Lankan prison officers and to explore the personal and work-related correlates of their burnout. Methods: An institution-based cross-sectional study was carried out in 2017, among 1803 prison officers including 1683 prison guards and 120 prison rehabilitation officers working in 32 prison institutions island-wide. Prison guards were selected using multi-stage stratified sampling, while all the eligible Rehabilitation Officers were included. Self-administered, translated and validated Sinhala version of the Maslach Burnout Inventory – Human Services Survey and a self-developed questionnaire on correlates were used for collecting data. Results: The response rate was 98.53%. Majority of the participants were male (88%) and currently married (80.6%). True prevalence of burnout was 31.1% (95%CI:22.1-40.1). More than one third (37.8% - 95%CI:28.3–47.3) were suffering from diminished personal accomplishment, while over one fourth were suffering from emotional exhaustion (28.6% - 95%CI:19.7–37.5) and depersonalization (26.9% - 95%CI:18.2–35.6). Feeling overburdened by housework (OR–3.9,95%CI:1.6-9.3), working in closed prisons (OR–5.4,95%CI:1.3–21.7), remand prisons (OR–4.9,95%CI:1.2–19.3) and work camps (OR–6.7,95%CI:1.6–28.4), perceived difficulty in shift work (OR–2.4,95%CI:1.4–4.0) and in taking leave (OR–2.8,95%CI:1.5–5.4), work overload (OR–2.1,95%CI:1.1–3.7), poor relationship with colleagues (OR–10.6,95%CI:1.1–103.3) and with families of inmates (OR–4.7,95%CI:1.4–16.0), poor welfare facilities (OR–3.8,95%CI:1.6–8.7) and job dissatisfaction (OR:14.3,95%CI:4.4–46.8) were associated with a higher risk for burnout. Conclusion: Burnout among prison officers is a significant issue requiring prompt interventions including basic and in-service trainings focusing on stress management.

Examining the Dutch Resistance Movement During World War II

This paper is an analysis of the Dutch resistance movement during World War II. During the German occupation of the Netherlands, 102,000 Dutch Jews were deported and killed, which amounted to approximately 75 percent of the pre-war Jewish population in the Netherlands. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of Dutch civilians were forced to work in German work camps to fuel the German war machine. Despite this, only 4% of Dutch citizens participated in the resistance movement. This paper will examine the roles of these resistance fighters, as well as several primary sources that demonstrate their importance and significance. It will explain that resistance work was incredibly dangerous work done by many local organizations that when combined formed a national movement. The resistance movement was recognized and encouraged by the Dutch government in exile and was viewed as a threat by the German occupiers. Ultimately, members of the resistance movement should be viewed as heroes who were willing to stand up to the evil of the Nazi regime and risk their lives for freedom.

International Association of Social Work with Groups

The International Association of Social Work with Groups (IASWG) is a nonprofit, volunteer membership association that advocates for effective group work education and practice. It was founded in 1979. Previously known as the Association for the Advancement of Social Work with Groups, the organization name was changed in 2012 to accurately recognize its global identity. IASWG has 21 chapters and numerous organizational and individual members. Through a series of programs and advocacy, it seeks to promote and support group work practitioners, scholars, academics, and students engaged in group work practice, education, field instruction, research, and publication. Key offerings include an annual 4-day international educational symposium, the creation and dissemination of the IASWG Standards for Social Work Practice with Groups, stimulation and support for innovative group work initiatives, sponsorship of Group Work Camps, and ongoing opportunities for scholarship and publication about group work.

Managing liminal time in the fly-in fly-out work camp

Fly-in fly-out (FIFO) work camps are built and organized to ensure that long-distance rotational workers are fed, housed, and mobilized in sync with the pressing yet unpredictable rhythms of resource extraction. Positioned thus ‘betwixt and between’ the complex relations of work and life (Johnsen and Sørensen, 2015), the work camp is a generative yet hitherto neglected example of the temporal operations of permanent liminality (Bamber et al., 2017). But what does this mean for workers? If camp does the liminal work of managing the temporal challenges of the resource-based mobility regime, how do FIFO workers experience and respond to its inevitable lived consequences? Drawing on rare qualitative fieldwork in Canada’s Athabasca Oil Sands, we explain the effects of camp time—disorientation, monotony, and entrapment—and examine the temporal tactics workers deploy to manage those effects, from embracing and disrupting internal camp routines to aligning and syncing with outside and future-oriented temporalities. We argue that workers’ tactics make them ‘competent liminars’ (Borg and Söderlund, 2015) of camp time, which is, in turn, crucial to the latter’s disciplining function within the FIFO mobility regime. Our findings invite renewed attention to the temporal mediation accomplished by liminal people and places, especially in organizational contexts aimed at institutionally harnessing social time to productive imperatives.

Fella Feige Drut

This article is the story of Fella Feige Drut, who was born in Rovno, Ukraine in 1923 and who in 1939, at the age of 16, was arrested by the Gestapo in Würzburg, Germany because she was Jewish. She survived six years in various concentration camps and work camps, eventually ending up in the Theresienstadt ghetto. Here, she gave birth to a daughter. Her ordeal and that of her close family members are reconstructed using documents from the International Tracing Service’s (ITS) archive and from other sources. Unlike many of her co-religionists, whose family life ended during the Nazi years (1933-1945), Fella Feige Drut was able to live on. Her resolve manifested itself in her fight for compensation from the German government for herself and her daughter, despite the bureaucratic hurdles placed in her way, and her resolution to leave Germany and to build a new life in the USA.

Southern Christian Work Camps and a Cold War Campaign for Racial and Economic Justice

This chapter looks at mid-twentieth-century southern Christians who saw interracial work camps in the South as a model for working alternatives to capitalism. Under Nelle Morton’s leadership, the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen organized the first integrated UNRRA cattle boat relief trip to postwar Europe and sent student work groups to support economic cooperatives across the South. These camps revealed both the potential and the limits of white-led activism in the service of racial and economic justice.

Growth and Development of Social Work Camps: 1920s–1940s

“Growth and Development of Social Work Camps: 1920s–1940s” continues the chronological overview of social work involvement in the summer camp movement. Several themes become increasingly evident: the role of the group, individualization, and the importance of the democratic process. Group workers established a professional identity during the 1930s. Books and articles by Joshua Lieberman, Hedley Dimock and Charles Hendry, and Louis Blumenthal advocated camps that encouraged resourcefulness and self-direction, social responsibility in a democratic setting, and the ideals of progressive education. The benefits of the decentralized camp and the primacy of the cabin group were recognized. During the 1940s, the child-centered rather than activity-centered focus received attention, while the advantages of year-round programming were emphasized. Group work became accepted as a method within the social work profession.

Jakub Chlebowski, Rector Magnificus Exultus – A Distinguished Professor of Internal Medicine in Postwar North-East Poland

Jakub Chlebowski (Jakub Frydman) (1905-1969) was a distinguished professor of internal medicine and skillful organizer of health care system in Bialystok region in the North east Poland. He graduated medicine in 1929 and worked at local university in prewar Vilnius. During World War Two, arrested by the Soviets and exiled to Siberian work camps he managed to return to Poland with Kosciuszko Division of Polish Army. Then, he continued to serve as a military and university medical doctor in Cracow and Lodz, finally to take over position of director of Internal Diseases Department in 1951 in Bialystok, holding an office of rector magnificus of Medical University of Bialystok from 1959 to 1962. Chlebowski trained generations of internal medicine specialists, who later became eminent representatives of emerging branches of internal medicine as distinct subspecialties in the field of cardiology, endocrinology and gastroenterology in Bialystok. In course of anti-Semitic campaign during March Events in 1968, he was disposed from the post of director of the university hospital department. Constantly harassed, he immigrated with the family to Israel to die in public traffic accident in 1969. Jakub Frydman, who survived not only hunger of food, but also metaphorical “hunger of humanity” during World War Two, turned out to be as good and useful as daily bread for Polish community after wartime. He was so devoted in this action, that he even changed his surname into Chlebowski (Polish: Chleb=English: Bread). In this way, due to similar experience and experience-shaped mentality, Chlebowski could be counted among medical authorities of the time, the individuals with such a high moral standard as Janusz Korczak (1878 or 1879-1942) or Julian Kramsztyk (1851-1926).