Social rehabilitation of prisoners - the illusion of inclusion

Abstract

The ultimate goal of modern social rehabilitation of both youth and adult violators is the social inclusion of this type of individuals, mobilizing them to manage their lives in a manner consistent with cherished values and norms. So much for the postulates of humanists and criminologists. On the other hand, the system of institutional dealing with criminals, especially the penitentiary system, is constructed in such a way as to deprive the individual who gets into its modes of operation of all the skills of constructive organization of his life. He is extremely based on external control, reducing activity to basic needs, saturated with deviant patterns, and negatively stigmatizing the offender so effectively that his possibilities of organizing his life after leaving prison are much smaller than when he came to him. Fortunately, there are new proposals and institutional forms of working with prisoners and people leaving prisons, breaking these conservative models and creating greater opportunities for social rehabilitation of former prisoners. The article deals with the discrepancy between the postulates of effective rehabilitation and the practice of dealing with persons sentenced to imprisonment, and presents one of the examples of dealing with this type of people in accordance with the postulates of modern humanistic thought, which is an open prison.