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International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology
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Prisoners’ Perception of Informing to the Authorities: An Analysis in Terms of Functional Moral Judgment

Yuval Wolf

Bar-Ilan University Ramat Gan 52900 Israel and Department of Psychology University of Cape Town South Africa, yuval{at}telkomsa.net

Moshe Addad

Bar-Ilan University Ramat Gan 52900 Israel

Nilly Arkin

Bar-Ilan University Ramat Gan 52900 Israel

A series of functional measurement experiment show that prisoners modulate their moral judgments of violations of their in-group regulations. The participants were 67 women and 80 men, sentenced for at least three years for murder, robbery, drug-traffic or white collar offenses. Each was asked, individually, to imagine a series of incidents where incriminating information on in-group or out-group inmates is delivered to the prison authorities or to an in-group source and to rate the deserved denigration of the informer, who was characterized as a leader or not and as a drug-addict or not who had a prison-leave or not. An assignment of approximately equal weight for social status, drug use and prison leave was found, beyond gender and type of offense. In line with the hypothesis of judgmental modularity, informing to an out-group source was judged much more severely than informing to in-group arbiter and than informing on an out-group inmate.

Key Words: prisoners • informing • moral judgment • judgmental modularity • functional measurement

International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, Vol. 47, No. 6, 714-728 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0306624X03255806
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