Criminal Rehabilitation: A Difficult Issue

When convicted criminals have served long terms of imprisonment, it is obvious that, upon their release, one cannot necessarily expect them to be reformed and able to reintegrate into society. In the potentially rough and violent ganglands of prisons, quite the opposite may occur, which raises a difficult dilemma in the criminal justice system. To maintain social order, those who break the law are expected to be punished, yet that same maintenance of order means that rehabilitation must be given a high emphasis. The ethic of rehabilitation is based on the assumption that criminal tendencies are not necessarily permanent, and that former inmates can successfully lead lives in which they contribute positively to society. The ultimate goal is to prevent them from reoffending, an event technically known as criminal recidivism. Prisons therefore contain systems of education or therapy, as well as assessment to determine whether inmates have truly developed remorse for past misdeeds, an ability to reintegrate into society, and intentions to do so. Assessing this accurately is a difficult issue, and it must be accepted that there are some people who can never be rehabilitated, however much we try. The term psychopath is often used here, one of the key determiners of this condition being an inability to learn from past mistakes. Techniques towards improving their behaviour are thus unlikely to work. Obviously, recidivism is highly correlated with this condition, yet studies have shown that psychopathie prisoners are equally likely to be released from prisons as non-psychopathic…