ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT The objective of the present study is to test the effects of practice of the Transcendental Meditation (TM)1 technique on recognized psychosocial and cognitive risk factors for criminal behavior. The study was conducted at the federal prison on the island of Curagao, Netherlands Antilles, from August 1994 to June 1995. The 300 male subjects (experimental group = 149, control group = 151) were predominantly of African descent and ranged in age from 16 to 62 (M = 28.2, SD = 8.4). Standardized tests were translated from English into Spanish and Papiamentu (the native language of most subjects) and showed 90% word-to-word accuracy in reverse translation. Twenty-one dependent variables were reduced by principal components analysis to 6 factors.
