The needs, practice and effectiveness of education and professional training of convicts

Abstract

With the implementation of a prison sentence as a separate sentence, the need has arisen for finding treatment methods of convicts that will contribute to the basic tendency - not to commit new criminal offenses. The aim of this paper was to describe the implementation of education in prison, convicts' needs for education, forms and theoretical basis on which the educational practice has been developed, and the assessment of educational activities effectiveness for convicts. There has been a constant search for the educational model that will meet the needs for education of a specific convict, and on the other hand, the needs of society and the labor market that a convict will join after release from prison. It is necessary for a convict, on the basis of the quality and level of acquired knowledge in prison, to take his place in the world of labor and in legal ways for obtaining subsistence goods in the free world. Parallel expectations of convicts' educational processes are directed towards their regimentation in prison during serving a sentence. Prison is primarily the penalty. An additional factor of modulation is the rationalization of costs of budgetary allocations in order to achieve a better result with the minimum resources spent. Two centuries of such search may seem a long period. However, the practice of punishment has been lasting for thousands of years. In this relatively short time period, in different penal systems, a range of forms of convicts' training has been recorded. They were more or less successful. There is still no irrefutable agreement that basic endeavor has been achieved. The data on the impact of education on reducing recidivism of convicts and the quality of post-penal reintegration are inconsistent. The search still continues.