NCJ Number
142930
Journal
Criminal Justice and Behavior Volume: 20 Issue: 2 Dated: (June 1993) Pages: 190-198
Date Published
1993
Length
9 pages
Annotation
This study examined the replicability of Melvin et al.'s (1985) Attitude Toward Prisoners Scale (ATPS) with the use of a Spanish sample that consisted of university students and four groups of criminal justice professionals from Catalonia.
Abstract
The subsamples consisted of 47 criminal justice professionals involved in inmate rehabilitation, 31 defense attorneys, 62 male correctional officers, 65 male local law enforcement officers, and 191 University of Barcelona students. In addition to a Catalan version of the ATPS, a Catalan version of the Wilson-Patterson Attitude Inventory was also used. The researchers predicted that the Catalan adaptation of the ATPS would assess a general attitudinal factor toward inmates just as did the original ATPS. It was predicted that prison rehabilitation teams and defense attorneys would have the highest scores on the ATPS, and correctional officers and law enforcement officers would obtain the lowest scores; students would score in the middle. The results generally supported these predictions, as the Catalan version of the ATPS is apparently an appropriate measure of general attitude toward inmates, fulfilling basic psychometric requirements of reliability and validity. 1 table, 2 notes, and 12 references