A group of non-drug users with a comparable socioeconomic status was used to provide additional understanding of the differences and similarities. The findings are discussed in terms of a status model that has implications for heroin addiction prevention and treatment. The study hypothesizes that the level of service or treatment (that is, prison or community-based treatment) will be associated with the psychological characteristics of heroin addicts obtained from self-report data. The subjects were 35 heroin addicts imprisoned because of drug offenses who were assigned to the prison's specialized ward for treatment. A second group of subjects were 22 heroin addicts self-referred to a community outpatient drug treatment program. A third group consisted of 35 persons who did not use drugs, but whose socioeconomic status characteristics were similar to those of the heroin addicts. All subject information came from a questionnaire developed by Ong (1989); it contains eight scales that measure psychological characteristics of drug addicts. The findings indicate that the psychological characteristics of inmates are no more negative (and in some cases are even more positive) than those in a community-based treatment program or those of a non-addicted control group. From a conceptual perspective, the status model used in this study presents an approach that explains differences among heroin addicts and non-heroin addicts. 4 tables and 29 references