|
|
 |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
| Workshop on Imprisonment in Europe
|
| |
On 7 August 2013 the Center for the Study of Democracy held a workshop on imprisonment in Europe within the framework of the initiative Re-socialisation of offenders in the EU: enhancing the role of the civil society (RE-SOC).
Since the overall topic of the initiative is the re-socialisation of offenders the participants in the workshop discussed what exactly falls within the scope of this term. On the one hand, there is the more or less narrow understanding of the policy makers who tend to understand re-socialisation as equal to prevention of re-offending. On the other hand, there is the broader understanding that criminal penalties in general and imprisonment in particular should have a wider impact on the offender. The participants also discussed the differences between re-socialisation and social re-integration.
Another issue debated during the workshop was the meaning of the term ‘offender’. Due to the differences between the national legal systems it appeared that the term ‘offender’ could have different meaning in different countries. The only category of persons that is always defined as ‘offenders’ are the individuals that have been sentenced by a court for a criminal offence. However, there are other groups of persons with more or less similar characteristics, whose inclusion in the term ‘offenders’ is not always undisputed: illegal migrants, persons detained in custody without a conviction, the persons accommodated in psychiatric hospitals because they have committed a crime with the exception of those whose psychiatric problems exclude their criminal responsibility.
Since the basic concept behind the initiative is to study the role of the civil society in the work of the penitentiary system, the participants discussed the work of what types of NGOs should they study. The major problem in this respect is that many NGOs are doing some prison-related work and there is no centralised source of information about their activities. A possible solution to the problem would be to search for some formal institutions or procedures that might help identify the major civil society organisations active in this field, for example registers of NGOs working in the prisons, if such are kept by the prison administration, participation of NGOs in public councils or task forces dealing with the prison system, etc. The other issue discussed in relation to the work of NGOs was how to proceed with the involvement of volunteers, taking into account all variations of the concept of volunteering.
The collection of statistics creates very serious problems and was discussed in great detail during the workshop. As long as part of the research is aimed at establishing specific trends the participants agreed that for each country data should be collected for a longer period of time. This would allow the identification of specific trends and developments related to the prison population, the capacity of prisons, the overcrowding and the profile of prisoners (age, gender, etc.).
| |
|
| |
|
CSD.bg |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
| ©
Center for the Study of Democracy. |
 |
|
The web page you are trying to reach is no longer updated and has been archived. To visit us, please click here. |
|
