Throwing Away the Key: Measuring Prison Reform Attitudes1

The American prison system is larger than ever and ranks among the largest in the world. Yet, prisons have received little research attention relative to other issues in forensic psychology. In an effort to study one facet of the prison system, a scale for measuring attitudes toward prison reform was developed. The 12-item scale has a single factor mea-suring whether people feel prisons should be tougher or softer on inmates. Several studies with diverse samples found that the scale has a consistent factor structure, good reliability, and a coherent pattern of relationships to other psychological variables. The scale appears to be a promising tool for studying how people want to treat those who have been offi-cially rejected by society. The American prison system has never been larger and ranks among the larg-est in the world. More than 5 million Americans are under correctional super-vision; over 1.9 million are inmates in state and federal prisons and in local jails (Beck & Harrison, 2001). Prisons reflect society’s struggles with racial inequality, gender relations, and drug policies. At the end of 2000, for example, 9.7 % of African American men between the ages of 25 and 29 were in prison