Guidelines for human spiritual development of female prisoners at Chiang Mai Correctional Institution

Abstract

This research was aimed at (1) investigating the demand for humanity spiritual development of female prisoners, (2) synthesizing the Buddhist principles for humanity spiritual development of female prisoners, and 3) seeking the ways for humanity spiritual development of female prisoners in accordance with the Buddhist principles. The samples used in this study included 1) 15 Buddhist experts chosen by purposive sampling, and 2) 288 female prisoners chosen from 1,151 female prisoners by simple random sampling, and the sample size was  determined based on the Krejcie & Morgan table. The instruments used to collect data were 1) structured interviews and descriptive data analysis and (2) questionnaires. Data were analyzed using statistics, including percentage, mean, and standard deviation.

The results showed that (1) female prisoners’ overall demand level for humanity spiritual development was high (mean = 4.23 and standard deviation = 0.544), and when considering individual aspects, the first rank was humanity spiritual development based on the Pawana Maya Panya process (mean = 4.27 and standard deviation = 0.619), followed by humanity spiritual development based on the Jinta Maya Panya process  (mean = 4.24 and standard deviation = 0.593) and humanity spiritual development based on the Suta Maya Panya process (mean = 4.19 and standard deviation = 0.614), respectively, (2) the Buddhist principles for humanity spiritual development included kindliness, congratulations to others, acceptance of truth, Threefold Training Principles,  four Noble Truths, and Noble Eightfold Path, which is the stage of enlightenment and finding of causes and effects, and (3) the experts proposed the humanity spiritual development way that the prisoners would not grieve in their painful past if they were taught about the value of their life by the monks giving the dharma training by focusing on sins and merits.