presented by Avraham Hoffmann at the ICPA 16^th annual conference, Windhoek, Namibia October 2014

“Arise and depart from amid the upheaval” wrote a poet from the 16th century, Rabi Shlomo Alkabetz, to describe the necessary process when moving from imprisonment to freedom.

After 30 years of dealing with prisoners in their process of leaving prison and re-entering the free society, from imprisonment to the ability to deal with free life, from being a slave of crime to becoming independent on the way to rehabilitation, I believe there are 4 principal questions that must be addressed:

1. Is a person able to get out of his lifestyle on his own?
2. Isn’t crime an external expression of lacking a purposeful way of life?
3. What is the difference between the rehabilitation process operated by the prison staff and a program preparing the prisoner toward his release by a Prisoner Rehabilitation Authority worker?
4. What are the fundamental pillars of a rehabilitation program?

Today I will present you my answers to these questions and explain the underlying philosophy and principles:

Question 1: Is a person able to get out of his lifestyle on his own?

The passage from the unrestricted life style to the features of life behind bars obviously involves a process of adaptation to the incarceration shock. The prisoner becomes an anonymous person belonging to a downcast group. He develops new manners to eat, sleep and work. Some of the prisoners develop additional adaptation methods, such as gambling, homosexual behaviour and drug abuse. Many of them develop hostility toward the institution staff and toward their fellow prisoners. The most extreme aspect of this process may express in passiveness, apathy, indifference and lack of response to degrading and hard attitude, not feeling responsible for one’s own life and a lack of purpose.

This adaptation to imprisonment may harden or even prevent the acclimatisation of the released prisoner to the world outside prison.

In addition to the freedom deprivation, society endures a long and severe additional punishment that is unofficial and maybe contrary to the spirit of law: the social banning and constant suspicions toward the criminal. Some researchers have described this attitude – stigma – as the main factor for the released prisoner’s return to the crime world and hence to prison. The widely accepted belief that a prisoner will eventually revert to his evil ways is preventing the prisoner from reintegrating into society.

Hence, the released prisoner’s will to abandon his previous life style and integrate into the law abiding society is not enough to ensure a success.

Society must help the released prisoner who wishes to rehabilitate, by softening the difficulties of the passage from one life style to another one, and by fighting against his criminal stigma.

In the past it was believed that the rehabilitation had to deal with the crime and its sources. Experience shows that the effort should be to take the prisoner out of his life style that leads him to crime.

Crime is an external expression of a distorted lifestyle, or a lack of life purpose that leads to crime. Hence we must focus on the person underneath the criminal.

The main effort of the rehabilitation professionals is not in dealing with the prisoner’s crime, but in trying to reach the point in life where he began to derail to being dragged by life instead of walking in a clear and directed path. We have to return to the weakness point and from there start advancing him in small measured steps, only after we have taken him out of the chaos he had lived in all his life. This is a great life revolution that will be realised by taking one step at a time.

This life revolution must begin by insisting starting to work 3 days after his release from prison is mandatory. “[…] we will do and we will hear“.* By entering the working world he demonstrates his ability to undergo a real therapy.

Many of the Prison Services professionals, naïvely believe they have the power to rehabilitate prisoners, while they are still in prison, and achieve a long lasting change that will sustain after they leave prison. Without a doubt, rehabilitation in prison gives the prisoner tools to prepare him for rehabilitation. However, in its advantages lie also their weaknesses.  

In prison, the prisoner’s ability to choose is limited. We can only assess his ability to stand the test of choosing between good and bad, when he is outside prison.

Prisoners have been suspicious toward society and mistrusted it for many years, if not their entire life. It is crucial to gain their trust. Therefore, their preparation toward their release must be done by someone who comes from outside the prison services, which in the prisoner’s eyes represents the society that is outside the prison walls; Those that will also accompany and support them after they leave prison; From within prison into the return to life in society, to their new life. This approach makes them feel reassures that they have someone they can trust and that there will be someone outside prison to help them. Their disbelief in society and fear of the future can only be reduced by knowing of who will accompany them outside prison.

Moreover, during the period preceding their release, prisoners are anxious and confused in regard to their future, which may increase their willingness to co-operate in planning their individual rehabilitation program.

The combination of the prisoner’s willingness to participate in a rehabilitation program and the presence of PRA’s staff in prison 90 days before their release – as representative of the “outside” world – increases their willingness to join a rehabilitation program and eventually rehabilitate.

Hence, there must be a clear distinction between the rehabilitation activities done in prison and under the Prison Services’ control, and the activities of the Prisoner Rehabilitation Authority, the PRA, that are directed toward the life outside prison.

What do prisoners worry about?

When the PRA was founded, 30 years ago, we conducted a surveyed with 148 prisoners to learn from them about the main problems that worry them and that dealing with may have consequent and positive implications on their chances to rehabilitate[1]. The survey’s main findings were in 3 main areas:

1. Employment: The employment difficulties preoccupy them more than any other problem (71% of the prisoners)[2].
2. Housing: 58% of them are demanding to move away from the criminal environment their present home is located in[3].
3. Family: 55% of the responders have mentioned problems with their parents at different degrees of severity; 20% have mentioned problems with their wives and 29% with their children.

We have defined rehabilitation as integration into the law-abiding society. The PRA in co-operation with the Prison Services have raised 21 domains to be addressed in the preparation of an individual’s rehabilitation plan. Among them were: The contact with the local social welfare agency and the National Insurance Institute; The prisoner’s savings from his work in prison; Employment diagnosis by the PRA employment coordinator and the employment bureau; Housing issues; Education; Health and mental health; Drug and alcohol detoxification; Debts; Alimony; Open police files; Divorce process; Etc.

Although rehabilitation encompasses many aspects, every rehabilitation program must include 4 pillars to maximise the chances of a successful rehabilitation:

1. Being drug free.
2. Employment.
3. Housing.
4. Integration into society.

1. Being drug free

It goes without saying that if a prisoner or a released prisoner is not drug free, any other rehabilitation activity is worthless. Today I will focus on the 3 additional pillars.

2. Employment

Released prisoners have a history of failures in the normative environment and lack of perseverance at work. 75% of them have no vocational training, and lack working habits. Most of them have even no elementary education, and have a history of drug abuse, a lack of stability in employment as well as difficulties in accepting authority. They apprehend their superiors and co-workers’ attitude and feel they are perceived through stigma. As a result, they come to work tense and burst for minor reasons. All of this makes it harder for them to adapt to a steady work place.

Without entering the working world immediately after his release from prison, the social therapy is worthless. Only by taking, for the first time in his life, responsibility for his own destiny, by entering the working world, he proves he is ready and able to continue therapy outside prison. […] I will do and we will hear is the released prisoner’s way to rehabilitate.

By entering the working world he declares: “I truly want to rehabilitate. Now, help me heal my personality.”

Many efforts are made in the field of released prisoners’ rehabilitation, in their detoxification from drugs, in emotional therapy, and in family therapy, but without any solution in the employment field, any investment may be for nothing. A lack of or failure in employment are one of the major factors for going back to prison. Some of the released prisoners have succeeded in drug detoxification, but difficulties and pressures in their employment, or due to their unemployment (such as poverty), bring about despair which facilitates the way back to drugs.

The integration into the work world is one of the major measurements to assess the success of rehabilitation. A survey conducted by the Prisoner Rehabilitation Authority (PRA) showed that the more the prisoner acquires working habits, while being accompanied during the process following his release, the better are his chances of being reintegrated into society.

3. Housing

Housing is not only a roof over their heads. In many cases taking a released prisoner away from a delinquents-stricken neighbourhood is a necessary condition for his rehabilitation.

The PRA has an agreement with the Ministry of Housing, which gives priority to prisoners who have no housing arrangements in the first year following their release; they may also receive a housing allocation. Both provided that they participate in a rehabilitation program.

4. Integration into society.

The re-entrance of the released prisoner into community is both difficult for him as it is for the community. He suspiciously wonders how they will respond, and the community looks suspiciously to see if he fails as they expected. And since integration into community is crucial for the success of the rehabilitation, the Prisoner Rehabilitation Authority has developed a course in prison preparing the prisoners toward his release. This course takes place 90 days before their release.

The importance of the course lies in the fact that it brings representatives of the community into prison to meet with the soon to be released prisoners. They deal with a range of issues that without preparation would lead to failure.

When a police officer comes to the course and shows openness to the rehabilitation, it contributes to lessening the tension of the future released prisoners. When a representative of the Social Insurance Institute comes to prison, it shows the prisoner that the government administration’s doors are not closed for him. By coming to prison to talk, the volunteer carries a new message for the prisoner – that society will not deny his willingness to rehabilitate.

Hence, the prisoner meets representatives of services and institutions that he will have to deal with after his release from prison. Simply by their actual appearance they reinforce the prisoner’s trust in his own capability to rehabilitate and in the community’s willingness to integrate him.

It is important to emphasise that placing the residential hostels for released prisoners in upper middle class neighbourhoods confirms that community integration is not just a slogan; it is a real door opening to society. The same attitude materialises in the shared housing program in which 2 students share an apartment with a released prisoner; and in rehabilitation program in Kibbutz and other forms of rural settlements. This is how society demonstrates its readiness to give released prisoners a new chance.

The Prisoner’s Family

 The prisoner’s family is an important element of the prisoner’s integration into society. The relationships of the prisoner with his wife and children during his incarceration are essential to his rehabilitation. It requires:

1. An intensive support for the prisoner and a continued connection between the prisoner and his wife during his incarceration.
2. The children represent the “soft” facet of the prisoner’s personality; hence the Prisoner Rehabilitation Authority operates a special program to enable the prisoner to maintain the connection with his children during incarceration. It provides special visits of the children in prison and support for the children to prevent them from taking the same path their father had taken. The fathers themselves receive guidance to prepare them for these meetings.

There is no doubt that the family is a key element in the prisoner’s future rehabilitation. The family is the most important representative of the community.

At the same time, there must be in the community, specially trained social therapists and employment counsellors, to ensure a quick and effective response to his problems after his released. A smooth release ensures a greater chance of rehabilitation. A “limping” release ensures a limp through all the way; a limp that will be hard to deal with or cure.

Conclusions

After 30 years of activities, we may assert that the rehabilitation of the released prisoner is not only the professional’s affair. Only the combination of public figures, businessmen and volunteers together with the professionals’ activities will ensure a rehabilitation process.

We have no power to rehabilitate prisoners. Rather we have the power to create possible ways for the rehabilitation of prisoners who choose to rehabilitate. We may even say that: with a comprehensive social effort we have the ability to remove obstacles from the prisoners’ process toward rehabilitation. The creation of social openness and public awareness, that perceives the rehabilitation of the released prisoner as a prospective possibility, strengthens the prisoner’s readiness to choose the rehabilitation path and abandon the belief that “no matter what I do, I will always be an offender in the public eyes.” The deepening of this public awareness creates an appropriate foundation for the professionals to accomplish their duty with social consent.

We must insist that the released prisoners meet society’s requirements. But, at the same time, we must also open society’s doors and our own doors [hearts?], so they can climb the steep slope, fraught with obstacles, on their way to rehabilitation, knowing we are on their side, even when they walk alone.

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* Exodus, chapter 24:7

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[1] (The Prisoner Rehabilitation Authority, 1986).

[2] Although 75% have no vocation or vocation certificate, only 8% have participated in a vocational training course in prison. 36% have expressed their will to study a vocation in prison, and 62% have expressed this wish to do so after their release. 59% of the questioned had primary education or lower. And 41% of the prisoners have debts that might cause them to go back to crime after their release.

[3] 7% of the questioned are homeless; 69% want to change their housing and, 58% of them are demanding to do so due to the criminal environment their present home is located in. It should be noted that the housing issue stands as the second important among the problems that bother them.

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