Selected determinants of readiness to change among offenders who underwent electronic monitoring

Introduction. In Poland, persons found to have committed a crime may serve their sentence in the electronic supervision system (ESS). Therefore, publications in this field appear on the publishing market, most often are in the mainstream of legal considerations. However, there is a lack of research reports involving people who can share their experiences of serving a sentence in this way. The aim of the research is to indicate selected conditions of readiness to change in prisoners who have been subject to ESS in the past. Materials and methods. The study was conducted in 2019 in 8 penitentiary units among 229 inmates. The diagnostic survey method and two research tools were used: the Readiness to Change Questionnaire and the Resilience Measurement Scale. In order to answer the formulated research problems, the following were used: descriptive statistics, r-Pearson correlation, Student's t-test and regression. Results. People participating in the study obtained a result indicating their high readiness to change and moderate resilience. Persons who have never served their sentence in ESS rated their ingenuity higher than inmates who have had personal experience with it. In the group of prisoners who were in ESS in the past, it was found that the longer they were subject to ESS, the lower their readiness to change was. Moreover, the more inmates who have not experienced the effects of ESS tolerate their failures, the more readily they are to change. The older they are, the less they are ready to change. Implications. In practice, it is worth conducting more studies with the participation of people who were subject to electronic supervision in order to identify predictors of their readiness to change. Ultimately, it is about indicating as many factors as possible conditioning the process of social readaptation of inmates, which should be taken into account at the level of ESS adjudication, striving to increase the effectiveness of serving a sentence in it.