Analysis of Personality Types among Female offenders in Lang’ata Women Prison in Kenya

Abstract

The world is faced with emerging and urgent issues regarding gender, one of them being the involvement of women in criminal activities. The main purpose of this study was to establish the influence of personality types on criminal tendencies amongst female offenders. The study was conducted in Lang’ata Women’s Prison, Nairobi County, Kenya. The study adopted a descriptive research design, where a sample size of 240 inmates and 3 prison staff (respondents) were selected using simple random sampling procedure. Personality types were measured by use of the Big Five Personality Inventory (BFI) which is a self-test standardized psychometric test questionnaire for offenders while the relevance of personality type knowledge was measured by a self-administered structured interview questionnaire for prison staff. The study instruments proved reliable with Cronbach's Alpha above 0.7 across all dimensions while content validity was used from the expert view of the supervisors for validation. The collected quantitative data was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 21.0 while qualitative data was analyzed through content analysis by use of verbatim. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the demographic information as well, to measure the personality types of women offenders in Lang’ata Women’s Prison. Analyzed quantitative data was then presented using percentages and summarized in tables and figures. Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism were found satisfactory in explaining criminal tendencies in female offenders in Kenya. The study recommends the use of personality psychometric tests in the criminal justice system to aid in increasing the awareness of offenders’ personality types to promote informed decision making and effective treatment of criminals through offenders tailored rehabilitation programs