The Attitude Toward Prisoners scale: a revised short version standardized on Italians (ATP-iS)

Objective: The Attitudes Toward Prisoners Scale (ATP) of Melvin et al. (1985) has been translated and used in different countries to assess the degree of positive and negative attitudes toward different types of prisoners and to investigate the impact of training and enhanced contact in modulating these attitudes, as well as the degree of negative attitudes reported by people and groups at a different extent of contact with. Even though the first validations of this scale in the USA, Spain, and Netherlands reported a unidimensional factorial structure, a four-factor structure emerged by more recent validations in Chinese and Romanian. We conducted two studies for translating and validating the ATP scale in Italian. Methods: In study 1 we tested whether a unidimensional or multidimensional structure was supported by our data, while in study 2 we validated a new Italian shortened version of ATP, the ATP-Is. Furthermore, by using this new scale we explored the effects of gender, age, type of work, and previous experience of contact on attitudes toward prisoners. Results: A unidimensional structure emerged for both the extended translated ATP Italian scale and the shorter ATP-Is. We observed that only previous contact had a role in increasing positive attitudes. Conclusions: The ATP-Is is a valid test and reliable scale for assessing attitudes toward prisoners. These attitudes seem to be mainly influenced by a direct, event short, contact with prisoners.