Paradoxes of experiencing time and functioning in Prison – longitudinal studies and their implications for psychological interventions

The following work presents a study of a group of 10 men serving a prison sentence, concerning temporal dispositions of their personality (i.e. time perspective, hope, future anxiety, acceptance of the past). The research was longitudinal—it was repeated after one year in order to check whether and to what extent these variables changed under the conditions of a specific situation—a stay in prison. In the course of the research, slight, statistically significant changes in the profile of temporal variables were noticed in the group of respondents after one year. There were also significant differences in the level of these variables compared to the validation groups, which shows the specificity of this group of prisoners. Based on in-depth analysis of two case studies, exemplary directions for social rehabilitation and psychological support for prisoners, which consider their temporal experiences, were proposed.