Life Skills and Criminal Thinking: A Comparison Between Offenders and College Students

Tirnady, Rachel (2008) Life Skills and Criminal Thinking: A Comparison Between Offenders and College Students . Thesis, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Central Connecticut State University.

Abstract

This study examined criminal thinking patterns and life skills in college students and prison inmates. Criminal thinking patterns influence the way in which individuals perceive the world and interact with others and life skills are the basic skills that are necessary for living independently as an adult. Approximately two hundred undergraduate students were surveyed using the Ansell-Casey Life Skills Assessment (ACLSA), to measure their life skills, and the Criminogenic Thinking Profile (CTP), to measure antisocial thought patterns. The purpose of this study was two fold. The first goal was to determine whether there were differences between college students and inmates’ scores on the CTP and the ACLSA. The second goal was to determine whether there was a correlation between life skills and criminal thinking. The results from the college student sample were compared to data from a sample of offenders which was collected in a previous study. Results indicate that there were statistically significant differences between inmates and college students, with inmates scoring significantly higher on the total CTP score and the majority of the CTP subscales and college students scoring significantly higher on the ACLSA. It was also found that life skills and criminal thinking are inversely correlated. There were gender differences on scores from the CTP and the ACLSA, with male inmates and male students scoring higher on the CTP and lower on the ACLSA than their female counterparts. Possible limitations of this study include that fact that the college student participants may not be representative of the general population and the inmates who participated may not be representative of offenders in general and that students may not have had as many real life experiences to base their responses on compared to the inmates, who were an average of ten years older than the students, which may have affected the report of skills. Future research could look at a different sample of adults from the general population, such as a church group.