• Korean Security Journal
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• no.57
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• pp.57-84
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• 2018

This study assumes that the perception of the ex-prisoner's against stigma will affect trust in interpersonal relationship. Prior studies have suggested that there is a stigma at the base of the awareness where people avoid and discriminate against ex-prisoner's. This in turn affects ex-prisoner's' recividicism, but there is no study about ex-prisoner's perception of stigma in Korea. Although stigma can be explained in numerous ways, this study is based on the opinion of Phillips(2016), which divides the subscale of stigma as perceived public stigma, perceived personnel stigma, and self stigma. He insisted that ex-prisoner's believe perceived public stigma higher than self-stigma. these results are consistent with this study. However, it is important to note that although ex-prisoner's are more aware of public stigma than self-stigma, they are actually more influenced by self stigma in pereonal relationships. This means that ex-prisoner's are more susceptible to internal psychological awareness than external social recognition. Therefore, the development and intervention of the program to overcome the internal self-stigma of the released prisoner is required. In this study, first, stigma, especially self-stigma turned out to have influence on the interpersonal trust. Therefore, as self-stigma level increased, the interpersonal trust decreased in most cases. Second, it was shown that stigma has the greatest influence on children out of family members, co-workers out of social relationship, self trust out of general relationship in. This confirms that stigma is a factor that greatly influences relationship between important people for ex-prisoner's. Third, since self-sigma negatively reestablish self-identity, make individuals recognize themselves as deviators and show bad lifestyle, which lead them to become habitual offender, ex-prisoner's need to make efforts to overcome self-stigma, and development and intervention of program that can make ex-prisoner's have positive self identity is requested. Fourth, although participants in the study were only male, it seems that there is difference in recognition of stigma by gender, and influence of stigma not only on interpersonal relationships, but also on social reintegration and recidivism imply that these might be good future research topics.