Social readaptation of released long-term prisoners and back to crime

• Authors: Miszewski, Kamil

Abstracts

EN

The Donald Clemmer’s concept of prisonization did not give long-term prisoners greater chance for social readaptation after leaving the prison. The socialization of prison behavior patterns during such a long period of sentence was to be so signifi cant that it became impossible to bring them back to social life. Meanwhile, research that has emerged since the 1970s is beginning to undermine this idea. More authors examining groups of long-term convicts come to the conclusion that they function in isolation quite well, and even better than prisoners with short sentences. Also statistics show that the scale of the phenomenon of return to crime after the end of a long-term penalty is several times smaller than in the case of short-term penalty. Long-term prisoners can cope well also at large. They owe this to their efforts in prison, living far from what Clemmer presented: they avoid subculture and gangs, take care of their interests, study and work. They have constant contact with the outside world and are more interested in it than what happens in prison. They function exactly differently than short-term convicts. They also commit far fewer regulatory offenses than short-term convicts do. Therefore, it seems that we need to look at Clemmer’s concept once again and perhaps revise its too strongly defi ned assumptions.

Keywords

EN

prisonization; long-term prisoners; harmfulness of isolation

• Publisher: Akademia Pedagogiki Specjalnej im. Marii Grzegorzewskiej. Wydawnictwo APS
• Journal: Problemy Opiekuńczo-Wychowawcze
• Year: 2020
• Volume: 590(5)
• Pages: 40-50

Dates

published

2020-04-22

Contributors

author

Miszewski, Kamil

Identifiers

DOI

10.5604/01.3001.0014.1168