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Abstract
The purpose of this study is to gain knowledge about how prisoners' academic self-efficacy, educational motives, and aspects of their prison sentences affect their educational participation while incarcerated. The article reports on data from a national survey on prisoners with Norwegian citizenship. The results revealed that prisoners who had higher scores on self-efficacy for self-regulated learning and mathematics self-efficacy were more likely than those with lower scores to participate in education. The reverse was, however, true for literacy self-efficacy, showing that with higher scores, participation was less likely. With regard to educational motives, higher scores on the educational motive of competence building predicted participation in education. Prisoners sentenced to more than three months were more likely to participate than those serving shorter sentences. Likewise, prisoners who had served between one-third and two-thirds of the sentence participated more often than others. The implications of the results will be discussed.
Keywords: prison education, educational participation, academic self-efficacy, educational motives, sentence length, adult education
Introduction
Many prisoners have low levels of educational qualifications or inadequate basic skills, which limits their ability to effectively act upon the challenges and demands of day-to-day life and employment (European Commission, 2011).
Therefore, prison education and training are recognized as crucial for prisoners' rehabilitation and societal reintegration and functioning after release. It has been found that education increases their post-release employment and aids the reduction of recidivism rates and associated costs (Davis, Bozick, Steele, Saunders, & Miles, 2013; Gaes, 2008; Machin, Marie, & Vujic, 2011; Steurer & Smith, 2003).
In addition to improving employability, prison education may also be an adaptive response to prison life (Dhami, Ayton, & Loewenstein, 2007). However, prisoners, like other individuals, typically select activities in which they feel competent or motivated for and avoid those in which they do not. The constructs of academic self-efficacy and educational motives may help explain why prisoners participate in education or not. It could also be assumed that important aspects of the prison sentence, such as previous convictions, sentence length, and portion of sentence served, influence their participation. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine how prisoners' academic self-efficacy, their motives for participating in education, and aspects of their sentence influence their participation when controlled for important diagnosis variables...