“Four Gods” in Maximum Security Prison: Images of God,Religiousness, and Worldviews Among Inmates

This paper extends research on images of God, which prior researchers based mostly on national survey data, to a study of offenders in prison. We first explore whether the distribution of Froese and Bader’s (America’s four gods: What we say about god–& what that says about us, Oxford University Press, New York 2010) four images of God among prison inmates is similar to that in the general population. We then examine whether an inmate’s image of God is associated with the inmate’s worldviews: beliefs and attitudes toward the law, other inmates, moral responsibility, and ultimate meaning and purpose in life. Finally, we test whether an inmate’s belief in a forgiving God and religiousness explain the association. We analyzed data from a survey of 2249 inmates at America’s largest maximum-security prison, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. We found the distribution of God-images among inmates was the same as that in national samples in terms of rank order. As hypothesized, we also found inmates with an image of an engaged God tended to report lower levels of legal cynicism and sense of illegitimacy of punishment and higher levels of collective efficacy, existential belief, and moral responsibility than those with images of a disengaged God or no God. Finally, we found an inmate’s belief in a forgiving God and religiousness to mediate partly relationships between images of God and the inmate’s worldviews.     

Validity of the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale Within a Forensic Inpatient Hospital

Although the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale(BPRS) has been utilized across several clinical settings, its potential utility within forensic psychiatric hospitals has not yet been investigated. Given the diversity of training and background among correctional mental health workers (i.e., psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, occupational therapists, recreation therapists, psychologists, social workers,etc.) it is possible that the uniform use of the BPRS among the correctional staff would require extensive training and that substantial “refresher” training may be required to maintain the integrity of rater practices. The present study examined the ability of previously trained forensic mental health professionals to accurately assess psychopathology using the BPRS. Overall,experienced raters demonstrated relatively high concordance rates with “gold standard” ratings across three BPRS training videos (Case 1, Case2 and Case 3). No overall “rater drift” was apparent. However, raters were found to make significantly more errors when rating behavioral observation ratings than for ratings based on self-report patient statements. Findings suggest that ratings done by forensic mental health workers are relatively accurate when compared to “gold standard” ratings established for assessment of community and forensic psychiatric patients. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.