Correctional Institutions: Rehabilitation, Social Reintegration, and Prison Reform

Purpose and Duties of Correctional Institutions

Correctional institutions implement punishment for a committed criminal act. They are part of the system of law enforcement agencies while providing an educational, social, and economic impact on inmates, ensuring the necessary standard of living for inmates in places of detention, performing production and economic tasks, ensuring the safety of employees, staff, and inmates, and other specific goals and objectives that are unique to correctional institutions.

Correctional institutions are obligated to ensure the implementation of criminal-executive legislation and to create conditions that ensure law and order and the safety of inmates, staff, officials, and citizens on their premises. The next duty is to ensure the involvement of inmates in labor, as well as their general and vocational education and training. Ensuring inmates’ healthcare and activities to develop their material and technical base, as well as their social sphere, is very important.

Another duty is to assist the bodies in carrying out operational and investigative activities within the limits of their competence. One of the most important functions of such institutions is to provide a detention regime for suspects and accused persons, particularly for those for whom detention has been chosen as a preventive measure to ensure their rights are observed and their obligations fulfilled.

Duty Violations in Prisons and Other Correctional Institutions

Prisons and other places of detention are not called correctional institutions by accident. The implication is that their primary task is not to isolate individuals but to correct them and reintegrate them into society. Nevertheless, many of the crimes investigated worldwide are recidivism. Recognizing that reintegrating ex-prisoners into a law-abiding life benefits society, many countries are taking their social reintegration seriously.

Examples of Social Reintegration

The U.S., for example, has a probation service for this purpose (Lowry, 2018). It provides social assistance, including employment support and material aid, as well as housing, to prevent recidivism. In Finland and the United Kingdom, public and non-governmental organizations are involved in rehabilitating prisoners, alongside government structures. These organizations develop specific social programs, provide social assistance, and engage necessary specialists on a voluntary basis.

Punishment vs. Rehabilitation

In other words, prison should not so much punish as prevent the criminal from returning to illegal activities after release. However, many still believe that the punitive function is primary and that the re-education and rehabilitation of prisoners and their return to society is an unlikely and, in real conditions, almost unattainable goal.

However, this view is paradoxical. Perhaps even the most “bloodthirsty” supporters of a punitive penitentiary system cannot deny that most crimes are directed against property, not against the individual. Most criminals can be re-educated. And this would benefit both them and society as a whole.

Examples of Rehabilitating Correctional Institutions

Denmark

At the same time, there are countries where the meaning of the penitentiary system is to rehabilitate criminals and return them to society, not to make money out of their slave labor. For example, the recidivism rate in Denmark is 24% (Yukhnenko et al., 2019). This is large because Danish prisons, such as Storstrøm, are more like university campuses. Spacious cells with private bathrooms, glass instead of bars, and communal kitchens where inmates cook their food. It is an attempt to socialize criminals while still in prison, to create conditions most similar to everyday life in freedom.

Norway

Norway’s Halden high-security prison is even more luxurious—there is no barbed wire or towers, but plenty of leisure, recreation, or labor opportunities, better than in many nursing homes. Norway also uses prison labor, but the prisoners are paid handsomely, and the point of the labor is, once again, to prepare for release. Consequently, the recidivism rate in this area is 20% (Andersen & Telle, 2022).

Of course, this is not about individual prisons, but about the priorities of the government, which in some countries prioritizes profits from broken lives, while in others, on the contrary, tries to improve society by re-educating criminals and returning them to everyday life, providing them with the necessary education and profession.

Call for Penal Reform

Reforming the penitentiary system entails revising the entire system of sentencing, encompassing both custodial and non-custodial measures. In developing countries, there are usually few alternatives to measures such as pre-trial detention or imprisonment. In most countries, courts can determine penalties in the form of fines. Many people who are fined end up behind bars because they cannot afford to pay the fines.

In developed countries, various alternatives to incarceration are usually available. Various alternatives to incarceration are usually available in developed countries, including bail and pre-trial release. Bail and sanctions include placing convicted offenders under supervision or sending them to community service.

My proposed reform for correctional facilities is to end the total isolation of prisoners from everyday life. It is necessary to introduce the work of a psychologist throughout the prison, but at the same time, not forbidding the person to lead a social life. Conditions in prison should be as close to the realities of freedom as possible, so that a person does not become alienated.

Otherwise, the prisoner becomes accustomed to prison conditions and yearns to return upon release, as things are entirely different in the real world. Establishing proper conditions for human life in prisons and arranging various activities that will introduce prisoners to the arts is necessary. Only the most dangerous criminals should be isolated from the general population. However, they, too, need psychological help and proper treatment. Otherwise, the world will be mired in recidivism, and it will be irreversible.

References

Andersen, S. N., & Telle, K. (2022). Better out than in? The effect on recidivism of replacing incarceration with electronic monitoring in Norway. European Journal of Criminology, 19(1), 55-76. Web.

Lowry, K. (2018). Responding to the challenges of violent extremism/terrorism cases for the United States Probation and Pretrial Services. Journal for Deradicalization, (17), 28-88.

Yukhnenko, D., Wolf, A., Blackwood, N., & Fazel, S. (2019). Recidivism rates in individuals receiving community sentences: A systematic review. PloS one, 14(9), e0222495. Web.