Preventing recurrence of crime through post-penitentiary care This article was prepared within the KEGA project 025UMB-4/2014 “Probation and mediation as part of higher education training of students of helping professions.”

In every society, however developed, there are individuals who disrupt rules and norms that have been transformed into laws. In other words, they commit criminal acts that can be characterised as acts dangerous to society, whose elements are listed in the Criminal Code. For a particular act to be considered a crime, two conditions must therefore be met at the same time: dangerousness of the act for society (the material condition) and fulfilment of the elements specified in the Criminal Code (the formal condition). From this it follows that an act dangerous to society but not matching the elements of any offence listed in the law is not itself a crime. Likewise, an act that otherwise fulfils the elements of a listed offence but does not reach the required level of danger to society (for example, the amount of damage, degree of harm, and so on) is not a crime. Such acts are classified under the concept of misdemeanour, for which sanctions can also be imposed, but not in the form of deprivation of liberty.
Society responds to crime in different ways, and the form most commonly used is one in which, on the one hand, society removes offenders from itself, and on the other hand tries through it to reform and harmonise them with widely accepted social values so they can again live as respectable, autonomous, and responsible citizens. This is the form of serving a prison sentence. According to Raszková and Hoferková, it has seven basic functions: retributive, regulatory, preventive, restorative, educational, moral and punitive. (Raszková – Hoferková, 2013, p. 40)

In the rehabilitation of offenders, significant emphasis is placed on penitentiary treatment of sentenced persons during the serving of a prison sentence, focused on their resocialization. This means a set of activities aimed at achieving the purpose of punishment, which is to protect society from offenders, prevent the convicted person from further criminal behaviour, and educate them to lead an upright life, thereby having an educative effect also on other members of society. To achieve this goal, many measures must be carried out during the custodial sentence. It is important here to differentiate offenders appropriately both in external differentiation (classification by the statutory definition of the offence and their risk level, and the degree of danger to society into grades with different levels of security) and in internal differentiation (their placement in open, semi-open, and closed units, where there is varying scope of rights and restrictions). In addition, it is necessary to develop a high-quality treatment programme, tailored to the specific convicted person according to the prospects for their rehabilitation. As stated by Ľ. Gargalovič (2003, p. 18), developing a treatment plan is “the basic means for implementing individual educational work with convicted persons.” It addresses all areas of the convicted person’s life, such as educational and upbringing activities, opportunities for employment, leisure activities, educational approaches, and also contacts with the primary social environment, correspondence, visits, relationships and ties in the family, and so on. When setting goals for such a programme, it is necessary to consider the degree and nature of the convicted person’s positive personal resources, their behaviour, sentence length, possible date of conditional release, possibilities of participation in individual and group activities, possibilities and extent of contacts with the outside world, as well as security concerns. In the treatment programme one principal, prospective goal is set—the one that should be achieved during the sentence. It is the desired result of the entire intervention and is reached gradually through partial goals, i.e., individual steps in corrective-educational work.

If this procedure is followed and suitable methods of resocialization are chosen, one could expect that positive changes would occur in the convicted person and their behaviour, enabling them to lead a law-abiding life after release without re-offending. It could seem that in the previous sentence the conditional mode frequently used is a mistake... It is intentional. In reality, offenders often return to crime after release despite the efforts of professionals during penitentiary care. As stated by one prison employee with whom we conducted an interview in 2005 within a research project, “prisons mainly try to ensure that the offender does not leave worse than he entered.” It is not always the offender’s failure alone; often, as we will show, recidivism can be caused by society’s own failure to create, to a sufficient degree, suitable conditions for the convicted person’s return to life at liberty after serving a sentence.

The causes of recidivism in criminal offending may be caused either by endogenous or by exogenous factors. It should be said, however, that only rarely are they determined by only one of these groups; most often it is a combination of both.

Among endogenous factors we might include genetic predisposition, mental retardation, mental disorders, and various personality disorders. For example, A. Zradulová (2002, pp. 16–17) distinguished five basic offender personality types: a mentally deficient type, which includes individuals with reduced intellectual abilities down to debility and in exceptional cases up to imbecility, who commit predominantly violent crime; a psychotic type, when the offender is in a state of insanity, the motive is unintelligible and usually brutal; a socialized type, in which one commits a crime only exceptionally and we understand the motive, often causing an offence through negligence; a neurotic type, in which frustration plays a major role, unresolved family conflict, and an affective type; and a psychopathic type, where the person is an abnormal individual, with characteristics more individual than general, and is therefore further subdivided into subgroups such as: affective psychopath (characterized by explosiveness even for minor reasons), hypertymic psychopath (with heightened emotional tone, elevated euphoric mood, constantly starting things but not finishing them), paranoid psychopath (so absorbed by an idea that the person cannot tolerate anyone having reasons opposed to their interests), hysteric type (easily swayed by moods, with sympathy quickly turning into hostility and hatred), schizoid psychopath (marked by emotional coldness and indifference to others), anetic psychopath (unable to have any interests other than selfish goals), and impulsive psychopath (whose main interest is in personal pleasures). Except for the socialized type, one can clearly see the presence of endogenous causes of offending, which are highly likely to remain after penitentiary treatment is carried out and therefore can cause recidivistic behaviour.

On the other side are, as noted, exogenous causes of recidivism. These can include, for example, employment (i.e. chances of employment), family, the offender’s social environment (including so-called “moral contamination” during imprisonment through co-offenders), or social exclusion. These can to a considerable degree be influenced and thus positively affect recurrence prevention. We can influence them through post-penitentiary care for the convicted person. In the following lines we will outline how.

As noted, one of the exogenous determinants that in practice compels the offender, after serving a custodial sentence, to recidivate is employment, or at least the minimum possibility of being employed. This is true. Being an offender is a burden that accompanies a client throughout life. As L. Vaska also states (2014, p. 18), among the negatives of unemployment we can include “increasing social tension, social crisis, worsening health, increased poverty, crisis of family and community life, increased criminality and other socially undesirable phenomena—socially risky phenomena.” A former offender truly has real difficulty finding employment even after serving a sentence. Even when they have gained certain professional qualifications during the sentence (through prisoners’ education or job placement), employers often require a criminal clean record, which places our client in a position of unemployability in the labour market. Without income from employment, a person again falls below the poverty line in this case and is forced to “earn” a living by criminal activity as the only acceptable route. To illustrate, in 2013 we carried out research and interviewed offenders after they had served sentences of imprisonment. We found that low qualification and, above all, the fact that they had been convicted contributed to their inability to obtain employment. The question for professional circles should therefore be how former offenders can secure their livelihoods without committing crime when, because of prior conviction, they are effectively unemployable. A solution can be found in the liberalization of employers’ requirements for potential employees, where the key factor would not only be the fact of conviction, but the specific offence for which the offender was convicted. If the nature of the conviction does not correspond to the requirements of the job, this fact should not create a labour-market barrier for the convicted person after release. Unemployment, as we stated, often leads to poverty, and poverty in turn creates potential for criminal behaviour.

Among the exogenous determinants of recidivism we also identified the client’s family. Here it is important to remember that family support— which may be the result of well-implemented post-penitentiary care that does not mean only working with the offender themselves, but also preparing conditions for their return to society—can give the offender the foundation for successful social adaptation. The importance of family in this context is also highlighted by L. Suchá (2012, p. 590), who states that a family with a member who has served a custodial sentence should focus on its new family arrangement, reintegration of the convicted person into everyday family life and into society, work on its own relationships with the offender and try to forgive them, and allow the offender to return to their role in the family and the obligations arising from it. Help and support from family can probably influence the social-adaptive process of the released offender most strongly. A family of such a person, however, usually needs to be prepared for its new role as a provider of post-penitentiary care, and therefore we must also view it as an object of help from other post-penitentiary care providers, especially in counselling.

We present the last two exogenous determinants of recidivist criminal behaviour together because they are to some degree interlinked: environment and social exclusion. Society, for understandable reasons, places ex-offenders at its margins. It fears they can easily return to crime, that there is almost a “code” in them, while often failing to realise that this very approach condemns them to recidivist conduct. A person rejected by society, even after having served their sentence, then has no alternative but to integrate into a social environment that accepts them—often one largely composed of people with impaired capacity for social adaptation. In such an environment, for its members, it is natural that behaviour runs contrary to the norms generally accepted in majority society, which leads the client toward re-offending as the result of adapting to the only environment that accepts them. A task of post-penitentiary care should be precisely to remove offenders from the risk environment after they have served their sentences and to integrate them into an intact population. Again, it is necessary to note that this is possible only by combining work with the offender and work with the social environment into which they are to return.

A central place in post-penitentiary care is also social custody. It is regulated by Act No. 305/2005 of the Slovak Republic on social-law protection of children and social custody. It defines it as “a set of measures to eliminate, mitigate, and prevent the worsening or repetition of disturbances in the mental, physical and social development of a child and an adult, and to provide help depending on the severity of the disorder and the situation in which the child or adult is found.” (§1/3) Similarly, L. Lešková (2012, p. 600) defines social custody as the curator’s task to focus intervention on solving arising problems, also together with the client, seeking suitable solutions for neutralizing or even completely eliminating the problems. According to the Act on social-law protection of children and social custody, social custody is provided to a person:

  • after release from imprisonment or pretrial detention,
  • when participating in probation or mediation,
  • when misusing drugs or being drug-dependent,
  • after termination of institutional care or protective upbringing,
  • if released from a healthcare facility for addiction treatment,
  • if released from a healthcare facility for resocialization of drug-dependent persons,
  • if requesting help in resolving an adverse life situation. (§ 18/1)

In view of the topic of our contribution, we will focus primarily on persons released from imprisonment. The social curator’s work with such a person is defined in several areas. The first is social counselling mainly aimed at providing information on options for solving their social situation. In social custody it is also necessary to help the client return to their family, if they have one, as we have already noted when discussing the family of released offenders as an object of post-penitentiary care. Since many offenders have a low level of qualification (even though they have opportunities for education during imprisonment to prepare them for employment after release), the social curator should, together with the offender, seek opportunities to continue vocational preparation. Often, after release, offenders have only minimal resources and find themselves in material hardship. Because many have lived in social isolation for several years, sometimes decades, they often do not know how to address this problem. Therefore, the social curator also assists them in applying for a social assistance allowance, in finding employment, or in finding a shelter if the client lacks accommodation.

In addition, the social curator can provide a resocialization allowance to facilitate reintegration of persons released from prison or pretrial detention. It should mainly be used to obtain identity documents and secure essential personal items. A convicted person whose prison or pretrial detention lasted more than 30 consecutive days may request it, and must also seek assistance from the social-law protection and social custody authority when reintegrating into life. The application must be submitted within eight working days from the day of release from prison or pretrial detention. Its amount is at most 40% of the minimum subsistence amount. It is not always provided in cash; if that is more beneficial for its purpose, it may be provided in kind or in mixed form. (Act No. 305/2005 NR SR, § 70) The social curator decides its amount and form of provision.

Alongside social custody, probation and mediation service also has a place in post-penitentiary care. As stated by D. Květenská (2009, p. 227), it has two main areas of activity—probation (supervision) and mediation (conflict resolution). Its core mission, according to P. Jusk, is “to mediate effective and socially beneficial resolution of conflicts connected to criminal offending and the effective execution of alternative sanctions, with emphasis on the interests of victims, protection of society, and prevention of crime.” From the point of view of post-penitentiary care, attention should focus mainly on probation within the probation and mediation service. It is defined in Act No. 550/2003 on probation and mediation officers, by which it is understood as:

  • organizing and carrying out supervision of a suspect, accused, or convicted person,
  • supervision of the execution of a sentence not involving deprivation of liberty,
  • supervision of the convicted person’s behaviour during probationary period when conditionally released from imprisonment and
  • helping the accused to lead a proper life and comply with conditions imposed by the prosecutor or court in criminal proceedings. (Act No. 550/2003, § 2)

Probation is ordered by a court, which applies it in case of replacement of detention, replacement of detention with guarantee, replacement of detention with a promise, conditional suspension of the custodial sentence, and in the case of conditional release from imprisonment. In practice it is performed by probation and mediation officers. According to P. Jusk (2003, p. 120), we can include among the tasks of the probation and mediation officer:

  • Mediating an alternative dispute resolution.
  • Setting the convicted person’s obligations during the probationary period. In this context, we emphasise probationary supervision, whose aim is to reduce the risk of further offending and contribute to reintegration into society (i.e., the resocialization effect of probationary supervision).
  • Ensuring cooperation with relevant state and municipal authorities, especially in connection with community service, which is considered an alternative sanction to imprisonment.
  • The probation worker should also participate in gathering materials for court decisions, such as information on the family, social, and occupational background of the suspect.

Post-penitentiary care for convicted persons has many possibilities to help the client adapt to life in freedom in both mandatory and voluntary forms. Its basis, however, is to view the client first and foremost as a person who needs help, and only secondarily as a person who has violated the norms generally accepted by society. Without help, this client is very likely to fail after release and reoffend. We created a simple scheme illustrating this point.

Scheme 1: Integration of the convicted person into life in freedom:

As it shows, without the help of professionals able to provide help and support to offenders after release from imprisonment—meaning primarily support rather than just punishment or control, as society often perceives from social guardians and probation and mediation staff—they are ultimately heavily reliant on recidivist behaviour. This is, however, a path that needs to be prevented. For this reason, we regard high-quality post-penitentiary care as the most important element of tertiary prevention of criminal behaviour.

Autor: PhDr. Peter Papšo, PhD. Bibliographic references

GARGALOVIČ, Ľ. 2003. Application of individual and group forms of treatment and special educational procedures in a semi-open unit. In: Zvesti zboru väzenskej a justičnej stráže, vol. 35, 2003, no. 4

JUSKO, P. 2003. The probation and mediation service as a form of social work in criminal justice. In: Acta Universitatis Matthaei Belii – Faculty of Education: Proceedings of Research Works no. 7. Banská Bystrica: PF UMB, 2003. ISBN 80-8055-873-6

JUSKO, P. 2009. Social Work with Youth and Social-Patheological Phenomena. Banská Bystrica: PF UMB, 2009, 217 pp. ISBN 978-80-8083-705-1

KVĚTENSKÁ, D. 2009. Social Work and Repression. In: Socialia 2009. Banská Bystrica: PF UMB, 2009. ISBN 978-80-8083-895-9

LEŠKOVÁ, L. 2012. Social Curator for Children in the Field of Social Work – Theory and Practice. In: From Theory to Practice, from Practice to Theory. Hradec Králové: Gaudeamus, 2012. ISBN 978-80-7435-138-9

PAPŠO, P. 2011. Resocialization of convicted persons during imprisonment. Banská Bystrica: PF UMB, O.z. Pedagóg, 2011. ISBN 978-80-557-0150-9

PAPŠO, P. 2012. Opportunities for post-penitentiary care in the Slovak Republic. In: LISNIK, A. – VYHNAL, P. – AMBROZY, M. – CITRIAKOVÁ, Ľ. (EDS.). The Social Message of John Paul II for the modern world: Economy versus culture as the driving forces of civilizational change. Ružomberok: Verbum, 2012. ISBN 978-80-8084-956-6

RASZKOVÁ, T. – HOFERKOVÁ, S. 2013. Chapters in Penology 1. Hradec Králové: Gaudeamus, 2013. ISBN 978-80-7435-264-5

SUCHÁ, L. 2012. Specifics of working with a family that has a member during/after serving a sentence (and related theoretical deficits). In: From Theory to Practice, from Practice to Theory. Hradec Králové: Gaudeamus, 2012. ISBN 978-80-7435-138-9

VASKA, L. 2014. Basic Aspects of Unemployment. In: KUCHAŘ, P. – VASKA, L. (eds.) Regional Aspects of Unemployment in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Bratislava: Iris, 2014. 978-80-89238-99-6

Law of the Slovak Republic No. 550/2003 on Probation and Mediation Officers

Law of the Slovak Republic No. 300/2005 Coll. Criminal Code

Law of the Slovak Republic No. 305/2005 Coll. on Social-Legal Protection of Children and Social Custody

ZRADULOVÁ, A. 2002. Perspectives on the personality of the criminal offender. In: Zvesti zboru väzenskej a justičnej stráže, vol. 34, 2002, no. 7-8