In this study violent and nonviolent prisoners were differentiated on the basis of life history and psychometric variables. Life history data were collected from institutional files and from a biographical questionnaire. Psychometric procedures consisted of the Mini-Mult Prisoner Questionnaire and the Bender-Gestalt. In summary, the variables included in the discriminant function suggest that the violent subjects were more psychopathological than the nonviolent subjects. The violent subjects evidenced behavioral problems at a young age in appropriately expressing anger. They appeared to have limited behavioral repertoires in attaining their desires outside the immediate gratification through aggressive means. They were also more emotionally alienated and less socially skilled. The violent subjects received more negative feedback during childhood and were incarcerated at a younger age, They were more overtly hostile and also more lacking in cognitive ego mastery. In contrast, the nonviolent subjects apparently learned during childhood to repress their anger to a greater extent. They also seemed to modulate their anger by withdrawing from direct interpersonal conflict.

This study aimed at finding the associates of social deviance and violence by using the variables of self-esteem, coping styles, social support, family relations, and life events in Turkish prisoner sample. The prisoners were a hundred male prisoners who are under arrest for different crimes, in istanbul Special Type Prison. Preceding the main analyses, Factor Analyses for Multidimensional Perceived Social Support (MSPSS) and Ways of Coping Scale (WOCS) were conducted. These analyses yielded three factors for MSPSS, as social support from friend, social support from a significant other, and social support from family / and two factors for WOCS, as problem focused and emotion focused coping. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was conducted to examine the type of crime differences for the measures of the study. The offenders were separated into two groups according to their crimes: violent and nonviolent crimes. The prisoners who acted nonviolently scored significantly higher in self-esteem scores. Prisoners that acted violent crimes were significantly more depressed and they show significantly more antisocial behavior than the prisoners that acted in nonviolent crimes. There was no significant difference found between the two groups in terms of their anxiety levels. Results indicated a main effect for social support, coping style, and family relations. To understand social deviance through the variables of the present study, a hierarchical regression was performed. The results indicated that presence of previous suicide attempts, unhealthy relations in the family, physical violence in the family towards the subject, the scores gathered from depression and paranoia subscales of MMPI, anxiety scores on BAI, hypomania scores on MMPI were found to account for 59% of the total variance in social deviance in terms of higher scores on psychopathic deviate subscale of MMPI.