Assessment of psycho-social factors predicting recidivistic violent offenses within a sample of male prisoners

The aim of current research was to investigate the role of prisonization, personality traits, and criminal social identity in predicting violent offending within a sample of recidivistic inmates from high security prison. Logistic regression analysis demonstrated that a higher frequency of imprisonments, higher levels of extraversion, higher levels of cognitive centrality and lower levels of in-group affect all predict a greater probability of committing a violent criminal act. These results provide a substantial contribution to the criminal psychology literature by further elucidating the intricate role of extraversion in the understanding of criminal behaviour, empirically demonstrating the importance of criminal social identity in the prediction of violent criminal behaviour, and providing additional support for the possible role of prisonization effects in the emergence of violent criminal behaviour.