Reacción a "A soccer project in prisons improves the behaviour of inmates and their chances of reintegration"

The research has all the elements and precautions of an empirical study, as well as having a control group that accredits the reliability and validity of the results obtained.  

In fact, the experience is not new, as sport has been used in many prisons as a way of improving the psychosocial skills of inmates for their social reintegration and, in the best of cases, to reduce the rate of recidivism. In particular, rugby has been shown to be a particularly conducive activity for violent inmates who find it an effective way to control their aggressive impulses.   

What is new in this research is that its efficacy has been evaluated with a control group. Most of those experiences to which I have alluded, despite having apparent very good results, were not accredited with the corresponding measurements in the context of a scientific study.  

The results of this work are promising and support what previous experience already dictated. In any case, more research is needed to test the effectiveness of these activities in terms of the different psychosocial ‘opportunities’ available to inmates before and after prison in terms of vocational skills, social and family support, as well as personal psychological resources. It would also be interesting to test the medium and long-term impact on the desistance from criminal careers and the corresponding reduction in the recidivism rate implied by the improvement, at least in the short term, of the social competences provided by sport activities.