Vold og trusler mot tilsatte i kriminalomsorgen 2006

Abstract

This study focuses on violence and threats towards staff in the Norwegian correctional service in 2006, compared with the previous years, 2005 and 2004 (Hammerlin & Strand 2004 and Hammerlin & Strand 2005). This three-year-time window allows us to uncover differences, similarities, variations and patterns that is difficult to identify in a more limited design. Our planned five years follow up report in 2009 will give further data to build on. In this report, it is the employees who are the victims of violence and threats. The offender serves time in prison or at the probation service. Our data collection combines statistics and descriptions from our self-reporting form with findings from the internal reporting systems in some selected prisons. The findings from this comparison are published in another report on hidden statistics about violence and threats towards staff in the correctional service (Hammerlin & Rokkan, in press). The self reporting form asks for both incidents and actions. Each incident often consists of several different actions; verbal and non-verbal actions, physical or material actions, social or psychical actions. The average number of actions in each incident for 2006 was 1,80, which represents a small decrease from 2005. An interesting focus is the various combinations of different actions that occur at the same time or takes place in a serial form. The report consists of three parts; first a methodological and historical part describing the ongoing work with violence and threats towards staff in the prison and probation service. Secondly, the report presents the findings of the self-reporting forms in comparison with those from 2004 and 2005, before analysing and discussing the implications. When comparing the three years, we find the patterns of the different types of action to be similar, but the amount of psychical and social violence is growing. There is also an increase in the amount of material violence. On the other hand, we find that the focus on social and psychical violence is often reduced to an individual matter among staff and management.