Modern Concepts in the Rehabilitation of Prisoners: Development, Characteristics and Perspectives

Abstract

The heavily modified concept of classical rehabilitation has once again become the central theme of new penal strategies. Since the key phases in the development of new punitive reactions to the crime were the abandonment of the concept of rehabilitation in the 1970s, followed by a law and order approach in the 1980s, and penal populism of 90s, the transformation of rehabilitation is unexpected and contradictory and raises a number of questions, of both a substantive and practical nature. Besides the development of the classical concept of rehabilitation, the social context of the modern reaffirmation of rehabilitative approach, basic characteristics of contemporary rehabilitation models, as well as the problems of implementation of the new rehabilitation as a global trend, are presented in this paper. Striking resonance of the new rehabilitation with the extremely punitive context of contemporary social reactions to crime and dilemmas related to the existence of new rehabilitation concepts are emphasized. The main question is whether the new rehabilitation necessarily shares the fate of the modern punitive populism. The goals of the paper are to raise the recognisability of modern understandings of rehabilitation and to point to possible perspectives for future development.