The relationship between prisoners’ educational motives and previous incarceration, sentence length, and sentence served

Abstract

The aim of this study was to examine Norwegian prisoners’ educational motives, and how previous incarceration, sentence length, and sentence served influence such motives. Three motive categories emerged: future planning (Factor 1), social reasons and escapism (Factor 2), and competence building (Factor 3). Among prisoners who participated in education, longer sentence predicted high score on both Factor 1 and Factor 3. Also, with the greater proportion of sentence served, participants scored higher on Factor 3. Among non-participants, longer sentence predicted high score on Factor 3. Previous incarceration was not significantly related to the educational motives for either of the two groups.