PRISONERS' ATTITUDES TOWARD HOME AND THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM.

This article discusses a study which examined the attitudes of convicted adult criminals toward the public system of law enforcement and justice. Male prisoners were selected from the inmate population of state penitentiary. The prisoners were selected on the basis of a five-fold classification of crimes, including murder, robbery, assault and battery. The data obtained in the study offer no support for support for the hypothesis that criminal attitudes toward the law are a reflection of attitudes developed toward home and parental figures. One exception to this finding occurs wit the group of convicted murderers but requires cautious interpretation pending cross-validation. Failure to find the hypothesized relationship may be due to inadequacy of the measuring instruments used. This possibility is to some extent mitigated by the correlations achieved between two separate measures and the general congruence of their rejection of the hypotheses under scrutiny. The possibility that attitudes toward the law and justice have several independent components gains some support from observation of subject responses to the indirect measure and a possible dichotomy of general versus experiential or specific attitude was suggested.