Rehabilitation of Prisoners in India and USA

Abstract

The duty of a sovereign is not limited to punish, restrain or deter a criminal or potential criminal. It must work beyond to facilitate a person with all those basic necessities or to put the person in such a position that it becomes less likely for him to run afoul of the law. This, act of the sovereign to bring change in the person and making him a clean law-abiding member of the society is known as Rehabilitation. [1] It is the most important stage, as no matter how well managed the prison is, the longer an offender stays in the prison the greater is the risk of psychological harm caused to him. [2] On the other hand with longer duration of imprisonment the stigma of the society gets enrooted even deeper. 

Thus, by looking into these problems the penologist time and again made attempts to improve the punitive provisions of the society that will remove the criminal behaviour in the society but not the criminal person from the society. Though the concept of imprisonment still remains in every society yet after-care programs and services are provided to the released inmate of the correctional institutions to help them to restart a fresh clean life in a better surrounding.

This project studies the last stage of criminal justice system, i.e., the stage of rehabilitation. It makes a voyage to understand the notion of the stigmatised society and its pragmatic shift in the approach of managing crime and criminals. The modern legal framework of India and USA is studied and compared for coming up with suggestions for improvement in present Indian policies.