Investigating Spiritual Health and its Relation to Crime among Female Prisoners in Urmia (2016)

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Spiritual health is an important aspect of health that can create hope and inner peace in individuals, giving meaning to life. The aim of this study was to evaluate spiritual health of female prisoners and its relation to the type of crime.
This descriptive-analytical study was conducted on 150 female prisoners in 2016. To measure the spiritual health, the Palutzian and Ellison spiritual health questionnaire and a demographic questionnaire including demographic data, type of crime, and sentence length were used. The collected data were analyzed using Chi-square, ANOVA and Scheffe test. In this study, the ethical issues were all considered and the authors declared no conflict of interest.
The results indicated 27 participants (18%) with poor spiritual health, 90 (60%) with moderate spiritual health, and 33 (22%) with high spiritual health. The results also showed that convicts of murder and accomplices in murder and those sentenced to death were at the lowest level of spiritual health. Overall, spiritual health relationship to type of crime and sentence length was statistically significant (P Given the low spiritual health of female prisoners and its relationship to the severity of the offense, it seems necessary that policies promoting spiritual health of the prisoners which are consistent with the evidence be taken so that not only other aspects of prisoner's health are improved but also crimes are prevented from recurring.