Women face many obstacles when they leave prison. Some of these they may have confronted before in prison, such as unemployment, substance abuse, low self-esteem, and anti-social relationship. Trauma is decidedly prevalent in the lives of incarcerated women [Anderson & Pitner, 2018; Brown Miller & Manguin, 1999]. We can help women from prison to reenter society by opening lines of communication through letters, telephone calls, and visits. Communities of support can sustain ex-prisoners during their transition. Faith communities can serve this role well. Encourage mentors and family members to help ex-offenders gain the trust of their faith community.
Serious leisure can be seen as personally meaningful engagement and a strong commitment to enjoyable activities (Stebbins, 1992). Stebbins also classifies the six characteristics of serious leisure: perseverance, significant effort, career development, personal and social benefits, expression of self and identity, and unique ethos. These characteristics can defined as major tools in assessing serious leisure participants on their needs and wants in picking a destination for their recreational activities. Serious leisure participants are people who, within a given activity, persevere and overcome difficulties, have careers involving the activity, evince effort and utilize specialized knowledge and skills, pursue their avocations within leisure social worlds, and experience durable benefits (Scott, 2012). In Scott’s study, he explained that serious leisure participants should be serious in doing recreational activities in order to obtained leisure satisfaction. Utilizing serious leisure qualities in assessing sport participants is a key in helping sport tourists to pursue their recreational activities. In the study of Zachary Thomas Herman (2015), looking at serious leisure motivations by age, there was a steady proliferation in motivation as age increased. The study proves that, once a cyclist get older, their motivation to continue cycling will generate. Serious leisure is activities whose motivation rises in intensity with time. Across all age groups, the strongest serious leisure motivator was pleasure followed by a sense of effort.
In terms of social benefits as part of the serious leisure qualities, few have focused on how serious leisure experiences play a role in communities by influencing participants’ perceptions of their communities (Gallant , Arai, & Smale, 2013). In their study, they stated that, they used the six qualities of serious leisure which are the perseverance, significant effort, career development, personal and social benefits, expression of self and identity, and unique ethos as a motivation in volunteering. Having a motivation to do a certain goal can influence us to do it properly and push hard in order to pursue it.
According to Stella Liu, Lowell Caneday & Tyler Tapps (2013), other influential variables related to participants’ characteristics of serious leisure, such as perceived skills or past experience, can be used for enhancing the understanding of their behavioural pattern. In addition to that, their study utilized the serious leisure qualities by assessing the athletes and the positive impacts once the serious leisure qualities meet the lifestyles of the amateur athletes. Though, serious leisure is defined as a tool that motivates the sport tourists in pursuing their recreational activities, Jinmoo Heo and Youngkhill Lee (2010) stated that, serious leisure as measured by affective attachment and behavioural consistency was not significantly related to life satisfaction. It means meeting your preferred leisure activities will not give you a
