Based on the quality assessment carried out in 2018 and 2019, it was concluded that it is necessary to revise resocialization programs according to modern standards. In order to achieve this in the period from February 2018 to December 2022, the Prisons Administration in cooperation with the State Probation Service within the framework of the European Social Fund project "Increasing the efficiency of the resocialization system" carried out the improvement or complete processing of eight resocialization programs.
People are convicted of various crimes and degrees of severity. About 30% of prisoners' criminal convictions include theft, robbery and fraud, 20% - murder, violent crimes, 10% - sex crimes, rape, crimes against sexual integrity, 20% - addictive substances, and the remaining 20% include other offenses .
"If we talk about these people, then most often they are children who have grown up in families without parental control, who have not learned to respect other people's rights, cannot control their aggression for various psychological or even physiological reasons, who started using addictive substances early, who do not have hobbies, have negative experiences at school and work, and are surrounded by peers like them. Crime is the law," explains Māris Luste, head of the European Social Fund project "Increasing the efficiency of the resocialization system" and the European Social Fund project "Integration of ex-prisoners into society and the labor market" of the Latvian Prison Administration.
Each of these people needs different help depending on the crime they committed, personality type, character traits and other needs. If a person has committed a crime due to certain factors, for example, inability to control aggression, inability to respect the rights and interests of other people, low level of work and educational skills, then the purpose of the Prison Administration or the State Probation Service is to diagnose these needs and choose the most appropriate intervention, including the most appropriate resocialization program. As a result, every offender is given opportunities to participate in society as socialized and law-abiding citizens after serving their sentence.
"We have a wide range of services that we can offer to clients in order to teach them how to meet their needs and achieve their goals in a socially acceptable way, without breaking the law, without harming anyone," says Aleksandra Kern, leading expert of the Department of Resocialization of the State Probation Service.
The project of increasing the efficiency of the resocialization system gave the Prison Administration and the State Probation Service the opportunity to review the tools at their disposal for the correction of social behavior and social rehabilitation of convicts, to better achieve the goals of punishment - resocialization of convicts and legal life after serving the sentence. Within the framework of the project, the institutions have at their disposal a research corpus, the task of which was to give practical guidance to the staff in scientifically based work with the factors that led convicts to crime, in this way new, evidence-based tools are in the hands of employees, which will help convicts to change positively.
The project worked on programs with different goals and target groups. Programs were developed and improved for convicts who are not sufficiently motivated to engage in the resocialization process, prisoners with suicidal tendencies, adaptation difficulties, a pronounced level of stress, young people under the age of 25, etc. As a result, a structured form of punishment is created, which is aimed at satisfying resocialization needs.
"All these years, I have watched how our system improves and develops, how in this case the policy of enforcing criminal sentences has changed, and what impact it has had on our employees and staff in general," shares the experience of the senior inspector of the Security Department of the Central Apparatus, Captain Kristīne Beitele .
However, program redesign will have completed only the first of three critical steps in initiating an evidence-based intervention. The second stage, which goes hand in hand with the first stage, is the application of the new methodologies in working with the target group. At this stage, the project researchers participate in the selection of the project trainers, and they or the authors of the adopted programs provide the training of the program trainers. The third stage is the evaluation of the effectiveness of the programs. As far as the programs are introduced gradually, an in-depth evaluation of the effectiveness of the first implemented programs was started during this project period, while general conclusions were drawn about the rest of the programs, the in-depth evaluation of which will continue in new projects. Since the research practice in projects is good, in time it will be able to be taken over for effectiveness research also within the core activities of the institution, not only projects.
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