To eliminate crime from our society it is essential to take tremendous and revolutionary steps which will bring a change in the behavior of the criminals and turn them into working members of the society. For this we need to establish some rehabilitation centers. To bring about this evolution in the system, a start should be taken from making jails a place of rehabilitation for criminals rather than a place of isolation from the outer world or worse a place where even an innocent person ends up in the company of con-men and hard core criminals and turns into a professional.
Instead of providing them with an environment where they can rectify themselves, the jail culture provides them with breeding ground of transforming a thief into a hardened criminal. In jails, criminals learn more about how to commit crimes than they do in an open society as in jail their exposure to crime increases; there they internalize more values and behavior of criminal culture and become a larger threat to the safety of the society. Rehabilitation would not only provide them with an opportunity to rectify but will also aid them in cultivating a profession or skill to become healthy and constructive members of society.
To break this cycle, proper care needs to be taken inside the jails to educate and rehabilitate the detainees. A sense of duty should be felt by the social activists, the politicians and other workers in the society to put pressure on the government to take some necessary steps.
SEMAB GEORGE,
Lahore, November 28.