To start with, my honest response to this topic is that it is really hard for people to change. I have seen a criminal in my community who spent years at the correction center, came back, and still killed another person. However, I believe that criminals can be rehabilitated. There are different reasons why people go into crime, apart from some that are genetically encoded. There are some people whose different situations pushed them into crime. For this category of people, if such a situation is removed, then it is easy to reverse those people.
Rehabilitation shouldn't be for hardened criminals, these type of criminals are better kept for life imprisonment because bringing them out are just too risky to the society. Imagine sending a serial killer, chronic rapist or kidnapper to a rehabilitation center. It wouldn't change them except for God's intervention. Let's take a drug addict as an example. He or she can be changed in rehab. If they don't do drugs for a while and are kept busy, probably with a skill at the correction center, they will develop another good habit to replace smoking.
Do I think murderers and fraudsters can learn from their mistakes once caught? My response will be yes, and my yes is based on the ones that are pushed into this act based on circumstances. You know, a lot of people start by stealing food to eat due to poverty before graduating to being armed, and it becomes a lifestyle. With time, this kind of person can change as they got into the crime based on circumstantial reasons.
Then, talking about the best ways to ensure that these criminals never commit crimes again, these are my thoughts below...
I think reorientation is a good start. There's what we call genotype and phenotype. Genotype is our genetic make-up. There are things you pick up from your parents that form part of you, but the most important one is your phenotypic characteristics, which have to do with the environment in which you grow up. It doesn't matter if your father is a pastor; growing up in one certain area makes you pick up a lifestyle from there. So re-orientation will go a long way in helping such individuals; it is a kind of overhauling the criminal and giving the person a different orientation. It starts from the mind because the mind is powerful, more of a renewal of the mind, although it takes time psychologically and through a psychiatric approach to really reorganize and re-orient them. This is the first option I think will make the criminals stop.
Secondly, it will interest you to know that every criminal has a skill. All of us have a gift. Most times, people misuse their gift or use it for the wrong purpose. For example, if an Internet fraudster decides to learn and focus on hacking people's accounts and taking their money, that skill can be used positively. In fact, that person is actually intelligent enough to do that. So you can imagine what that person can be by being a programmer and writing codes that can solve problems instead of those that can create problem. So my second way will be to convert their skills into a positive impact. Whatever criminal offense they committed can be used for something good.
So in the process of orientation and overhauling their childhood upbringing, you can identify what gift these people have.
In prison, people are not just locked up and fed like animals; they are taught skills and exposed to a lot, but sincerely, it's not done here in Nigeria but over there in overseas. Our own prison structure here is terrible, but that's not my focal point in this post. So when these criminals are exposed to a lot they can do with their hands or identify what they are good at and push them towards that way, some of them can actually change, and it becomes better when they can earn legally through their identified skill away from crime.
This is my response to the #HiveLearners community contest on the topic titled "Do You Believe in Rehab?"