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Criminal rehabilitation is based on the ideas that people are not inherently bad. Instead they are taught to make wrong decisions by environmental influences. This is the classic nature verses nurture argument.
Are people born bad or are they made that way due to poverty, bad parenting, or abuse? Studies have shown how nurturing (environmental influence) affect crime rates, the list below are the most significant factors:
These environmental influences obviously influence whether a person commits a crime. So what options are available for rehabilitation in order to prevent repeat offenses and how effective are they?
Criminal rehabilitation is essentially the process of helping inmates grow and change, allowing them to separate themselves from the environmental factors that made them commit a crime in the first place. The idea is to treat each of the major contributing factors in order to help give an inmate the ability to live a crime-free life after they are released from prison.
One of the biggest challenges for inmates is being institutionalized, living in prison so long that the no longer know how to function in outside world. This makes some of them commit crimes so they can go back to prison where they know how to survive. So what rehabilitation programs have been created to help inmates readjust to society and remove themselves from all of the environmental risk factors?
Rehabilitation is built on the idea that people are not natural criminals, instead environmental factors predispose them towards committing crimes. This idea also means that these factors can be addressed and help criminals learn a different way of life.
There are dozens of different programs that help with rehabilitation for prisoners. All of them address different factors that are known to contribute to crime, which are drugs and alcohol, mental illness, poverty, education, and bad/absent parenting. Each factor has a different solution, which is why there are so many programs that help every unique person find a way to live outside of prison successfully.
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Intro to Criminal Justice: Help and Review14 chapters | 533 lessons
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