Should criminals be punished with lengthy jail terms or re-educated and rehabilitated using community service programmes before being reintroduced to the society.

Should criminals be punished with lengthy jail terms or re-educated and rehabilitated using community service programmes before being reintroduced to the society.

 

I firmly believe that law enforcing agencies of a state should bear in mind the motive and degree of the offence, the circumstances in which it was committed, the age and the character of the alleged person (including the antecedents) while awarding a punitive course to the offender. I would elaborate further on my thesis based on the following reasons. Firstly, rehabilitation is the way forward and secondly that the retributive theory practised by many nations across the world is a faulty approach to assimilating people in society.

 

Rehabilitation is not only a medical requirement but a social requirement too. Every form of discomfort or derailment consequently warrants rehabilitation and that is the best course for a person to recuperate and get back to their new self. Rehabilitation is a process which entails the exposure to dual or multiple environments to enable a person to develop a sensibility and sense of his existence in that sphere. For example, voluntary servicemen who are despatched to war torn zones and conflict nations return very troubled and overwhelmed by the extent of human suffering and the ruthless civil violations brought upon the citizens by their maniac dictators, leave them quite shattered. These people have to go through a sensitising and rehabilitation program to help them not necessarily forget their past but to accept the vagaries of life and move along with; we would have many returning from such despicable places across the world mentally ruined.    

 

 

On the other hand, the practise prevalent across the world is the retributive approach. Many nations prescribe and some even enforce these revengeful penal laws as a counter measure designed to ensure that the offenders suffer an equitable amount if not more pain suffered by their victims. For example, countries still have and award capital punishment in rare cases but what’s worse is to award offenders life time imprisonments and then just leave them to decay in oblivion. Many such offenders have become more terrible human beings and personalities within the prison wall and have invented ways of creating worse social upheavals than being rehabilitated as the purposeful intention of reformation is meant to be.

 

In conclusion I would like to opine that, ‘punishments should not be regarded as settling an old account but rather as opening a new one, for example a rose blooms proportionately to the new additives in the soil and not because of what was already present prior to its existence.’ Thus, I strongly recommend that rehabilitation be the way forward sans old archaic and criminalising theories and practises that have had more negative outcomes.  

 

Written by Mansi Kharbanda | Edited by David Conrad Linus (aka John Smith)