Personality Disorder among Male Prisoner in Erbil/ Iraq

Abstract

Background and objectives: Personality disorders are enduring, persistent and pervasive disorders of inner experience and behavior that cause distress or significant impairment in social functioning. They have strong relationship to offending and violence; our aim in the study was to determine the prevalence rate of each specific types of personality disorder among male sentenced prisoners and correlation with crime typologies of the studied population.Methods: 100 male sentenced prisoners in Erbil adult reformatory prison were assessed by the use of a semi structured psychiatric interview schedule based on DSM-IV criteria for diagnosing personality disorders. In addition, information were collected regarding socio demographic and crime characteristics by specifically designed questionnaire, the data were analyzed by specific statistical method.Results: The study shows that the prevalence of personality disorder in general was 80%; the most prevalent one was antisocial 32%.

The most represented crime was murder 35%, the majority of the crimes were done alone 74%, and most of them had no previous crime record 86%. Conclusion: This study comes to conclude that there is a high rate of personality disorders in the ‎prison community and there is a correlation between personality disorders ‎and offences.

Keywords: prisoner, crime, personality disorder, Erbil.