The Moral Values of People Deprived of Freedom

Abstract

When evaluating moral transformations in Polish society, the group of prisoners is skipped. The reason of that may be the supposition that they are rotten people so they are deprived of all or most moral values of society. The effect of skipping this group in moral examinations is the situation of not diagnosing the contemporary moral values of the prisoners. That is why the purpose of the article was examining moral values of the prisoners. Pro-sociality was adopted as the conception of the moral order. It consists of three aspects: individual morality (personal norms), interpersonal morality (the motives of moral behavior) and civil behaviour. The examination was carried out in the group of one hundred men imprisoned in Correctional Institution in Płock in August 2013.

The analysis of the examination results shows the differences of the moral values in the group of the convicts. The expectations expressed in the investigational hypotheses, that the level of the implementation of moral values is influenced by criminal record and the attitude to the rules of the criminal subculture, were partially confirmed. Having carried out the examinations, the assumption that the prisoners are rotten so turning down all or most moral values and norms is baseless. Among the convicts there are, of course, persons with high level of demoralization, the active representatives of the criminal subculture and antisocially disordered. However, it is not pertinent to scrutinize the whole population of the convicts.