THE CHARACTERISTICS OF EDUCATIONAL INSTRUCTORS IN YOUTH CORRECTIONAL FACILITIES AND THEIR ATTITUDES TOWARDS THEIR ROLES AND THE INMATES UNDER THEIR CARE

Educational instructors in youth correctional facilities are paraprofessionals, with no formal education. These research studies the way that their characteristics namely gender, religiousness and education level, affect the way they perceive the delinquent and social deviant youth who are under their care and supervision and also the way they perceive their own job as educators, care-takers and behavior designers. These attitudes are assumed to shape and influence the quality of the rehabilitation process.
The attitude towards their job was tested regarding to the instructors' orientation to several job-related tasks, located on two sequences: authority – treatment and group – subject. The attitude towards the inmates was tested while using four elements that were found in previous research to affect the perception of the victim and blaming the victim, and were specially adjusted for this study: attributions of responsibility, criminality, and weakness of personality and lack of ability to change.
The study included 320 educational instructors that work in 55 Israeli youth correctional facilities. The instructors filled in a questionnaire that referred to some demographic variables along with 36 items that refers to the instructor approach and perception of his job, those items dealt with four different approaches: authoritarian, bonding with the inmate, create a positive group atmosphere and contributing to an effective intervention while working with the young juvenile delinquents. In addition the instructors were asked to evaluate four different stories in terms of moral judgment and character judgment (attributions of responsibility, criminality, and weakness of personality and lack of ability to change) of the subject which is described in each story. The stories vary in two main elements: involvement in delinquency (yes or no) and being a victim (yes or no). The findings show that the instructor's attitudes towards their job and towards the inmates can be predicted by the examined aspects; Educational level was the strongest predictor among the three, and so, higher level of education among the instructors predicted a more treatment oriented as well as a more 'bonding with the subject' orientation, those instructors tend to perceive the young inmates as not guilty in their current status and as youth that deserve help, while less educated instructors demonstrated a more authoritarian and 'blaming kind of orientation' as well as a more 'group intervention' kind of approach.
Another significant difference was revealed in terms of religiosity, while the religious instructors tend to blame the inmates for their status and perceive them as weak, delinquents and unable to change and the secular instructors showed tendency to prefer focusing in effective treatment than in authoritarian approach. In each of the findings the opposite group showed opposite results.
The gender of the instructors was found to be insignificant in the prediction of their attitudes towards their job end the youth under their care.