The Dominican Republic's “New Prison Management Model” has been a beacon of progressive corrections reform in Latin America, with “rehabilitation” as a key pillar. This article analyzes reform leaders’ discursive claims about rehabilitation programs, the actual practices of education, work, and artistic programs in prisons, and the explanations that staff and incarcerated people offer about how these programs rehabilitate. Prison staff deploy concepts of internal moral change through reflection, adversity, and work. Yet, they also speak about and allocate resources to programs in ways that uplift social exclusion and stigma as root causes of crime. This emphasis, combined with relatively shallow clinical interventions, disrupts assumptions rooted in Global North research about criminal behavior and desistance. Even though the Dominican perspective is infused with paternalism and religiosity, its grounding in structural inequalities is more progressive and appropriate than a focus on individual attitudes or cognitive deficiencies.
Jennifer Peirce (Sun,) studied this question.
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