A 2-year, quasi-experimental study was conducted in collaboration with Prison Fellowship International (PFI) to assess the effectiveness of four Christian faith-based, offender rehabilitation programs operating in 10 Colombian prisons, located in or near seven cities. For the experimental group, a self-administered survey was conducted with program-participating prisoners twice, one before (pretest) and another after participation (posttest). For the control group, a survey was also administered twice with prisoners who had not participated in any of the four programs with two surveys being administered about 2-3 months apart.
We hypothesize that:
(1) program participation increases religiosity;
(2) increased religiosity contributes to restorative rehabilitation, conceptualized in terms of self-identity (identity transformation) and human flourishing in five life domains (happiness & life satisfaction, physical & mental health, meaning & purpose, character & virtue, and close social relationships);
(3) the program-generated rehabilitation decreases the risk of interpersonal aggression in prison. To test these hypotheses, we applied manifest-variable structural equational modeling to analyze the survey data combined with official data from Colombia’s national correctional agency. Results first showed that program participation enhanced prisoner’s relationship with Jesus Christ, which in turn increased the frequency of religious practices. Next, increased religiosity was found to contribute to identity transformation and increase human flourishing of all the five domains including virtue development (e.g., self-control, accountability, and forgiveness). Finally, we found that the program participation-associated decrease in negative emotions and increase in forgiveness reduced the likelihood of engaging in aggressive behavior toward another prisoner in an emotionally volatile situation.
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Dr Sung Joon Jang
Research Professor, Pepperdine University & Baylor University, United States
Sung Joon Jang is Research Professor of Criminology and co-director of the Program on Prosocial Behavior within the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University and Visiting Scholar at the Center for Faith and the Common Good at Pepperdine University. His research focuses on the effects of religion and spirituality as well as family, school, and peers on crime and delinquency. It has been published in social scientific journals of sociology, criminology, psychology, and social work. He is also co-author of two books, The Angola Prison Seminary (2016), which evaluates the influence of a Bible College and inmate-led congregations on prisoners serving long and life sentences, and The Restorative Prison: Essays on Inmate Peer Ministry and Prosocial Corrections (2021), which looks at the empirical evidence in support of the link between religion and the emerging sub-field of positive criminology. Jang has conducted a quasi-experimental study assessing the effectiveness of a trauma healing program for jail inmates and a series of studies examining the effects of faith-based programs on prisoner rehabilitation (identity transformation, a sense of meaning and purpose in life, and virtue development) in Colombia and South Africa as well as in the United States. Jang is the founding President of the Korean Society of Criminology in America and has been active in many capacities in the American Society of Criminology. Jang is co-principal investigator of the Global Flourishing Study, a 5-year longitudinal study which will survey more than 200,000 participants in 22 countries annually from 2021 to 2026.
