Assessing a Faith-Based Program for Trauma Healing Among Jail Inmates: A Quasi-Experimental Study

Religion, Accountability, and the Risk of Aggressive Misconduct Among Prisoners: Preliminary Evidence of Restorative Rehabilitation

Prior research has found inverse relationship between religious involvement and misconduct among prisoners. In this study, we examined the mediating role of accountability as welcoming responsibility for one's actions with respect to the transcendent (e.g., God or a higher power) and other people. We applied structural equation modeling to analyze data from surveys with 339 individuals (108 females and 231 males) incarcerated at three facilities in Texas. We found that prisoner religiosity was positively related to transcendent accountability, which was in turn positively associated with human accountability. Human accountability was then positively associated with empathy and negatively associated with impulsivity. Via impulsivity, human accountability was indirectly and inversely related to anger, depression, and anxiety. Further, the other-directed negative emotion (anger) was positively associated with the risk of other-directed, aggressive misconduct. The results suggest that accountability as forward-looking, active responsibility may play an important role in the restorative rehabilitation of prisoners.

Spiritual Victimology: Basic Principles

This study aims to describe the spiritual characteristics of sexual victimization and the recovery journey of survivors via applying spiritual principles, in order to harness the findings for the development of the theory of Spiritual Victimology. Two research questions were asked: what spiritual principles characterize victimization and recovery from it, and how can spiritual perceptions assist survivors? In a phenomenological study, 17 sexual trauma survivors who view their recovery as a spiritual journey, 10 spiritually-oriented therapists, and 9 spiritual leaders were interviewed. Findings show that a unique, victimized self-centeredness characterized sexual trauma, attaching survivors to a victim identity. By applying spiritual principles, the survivors were gradually opened up to love and developed a new, spiritual sense of self, with better inter- and intra-personal connections, as well as a transpersonal one. This connection was perceived as highly important to survivors' recovery, freeing them from loneliness and isolation, and helping them to restore some order to the chaos which the trauma and its consequences had imposed on their lives.