The nature of human nature will never be known, but this has not prevented philosophers and thinkers from attempting to explore it. There is a plurality of opinions about what man ultimately wants and strives for. The classical school of criminology, based on the ideas of Beccaria, postulates the freedom and rationality of human life (Stohr & Walsh, 2018). In other words, the individual tends to make his or her own decisions and weigh their consequences throughout life — as a consequence, the classical school recognizes that crimes tend to be committed consciously and are the result of free will. However, this concept does not apply to those criminals who may have committed negligent homicides: statistics report that about 14 percent of inmates in the state do so (Carson, 2019). Closely related to the rationalism of the human person is the idea of free will agents, which view individuals as bearers of personal decisions: the individual chooses between good and evil based on their own moral system. An alternative view of the decision to commit crimes is the pleasure paradigm put forward by Bentham (Stohr & Walsh, 2018). The philosopher was convinced that people tend to be guided by the principles of personal pleasure and satisfying the need for pleasure while committing crimes — episodes of bloodthirsty and most immoral atrocities can be reliable evidence of this theory (Johnson et al., 2005). Based on the above paradigms, it is pertinent to conclude that there is no universal answer to the question of the re-education of criminals. On the one hand, if the core of committing crimes is the moral values or rational decisions of the individual, then re-education seems to be a feasible strategy. Satisfying pleasure may seem like a much more difficult but still possible problem for re-education since underlying psychobiological patterns can have extremely strong roots in the socialized individual. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that the offender has a sincere desire to re-educate, which means that any re-education practices may not be effective. Also to be considered are crimes committed accidentally in which the motive was not conscious; for such offenders, re-education may not be helpful because they had no evil intentions. Consequently, the concept of re-education is not universal and must be adapted to each offender individually.
References
Carson, E. A. (2019). Prisoners in 2019. U.S. Department of Justice.
Johnson, R., Dobrzanska, A., & Palla, S. (2005). The American prison in historical perspective: Race, gender, and adjustment. Prisons: Today and Tomorrow, 22-42.
Stohr, M. K., & Walsh, A. (2018). Corrections: The essentials. SAGE Publications.