HUMAN RIGHTS OF PRISONERS - INDIA AND THE WORLD
One of the major issues championed fervently by the world human rights movement, is the recognition of human rights of prisoners, or more specifically, the recognition of the prisoner as a human being. Central to the quest for amelioration of the miserable condition of prisoners, is the logical assumption that the prison degrades and dehunmanizes a human being. Another implicit assumption, is that all prisoners are not necessarily born criminals but the brutally and barbarity of prison life, transform them into potential enemies of society, adding to the list of arch criminals dreaded and despised by all. George Bernard Shaw observed very rightly, that 'To punish a man retributively, you need to injure him. And men are not improved by injuries'. T. H. Green, the noted idealist thinker, was of the decided view, that when the state condemns a person to imprisonment, its aim should be to transform him into a good citizen through a radical reformation of his character. Green was decidedly in favour of reformatory punishment as a against retributive punishment. Michel Foucault, one of the leading Post-Modernist thinkers, in a scathing criticism of the inhumanities of prison life, says that 'those leaving prison, have more chance before, of going back to it ... The prison can not fail to produce delinquents. It does so by the very type of
Human rights in India : historical, social and political perspectives
The essays in this volume tackle the complex issue of human rights from different perspectives, and cover such diverse issues as the rights of tribal peoples, prisoners and refugees, the constitutional context of human rights, human rights in education, feminist perspective, the role of the media, organizational bases of human rights and the NHRC.
Behaviorism: part of the problem or part of the solution.
The form frequently taken by behavior-modification programs is analyzed in terms of the parent science, Behaviorism. Whereas Behaviorism assumes that behavior is the result of contingencies, and that lasting behavior change involves changing the contingencies that give rise to and support the behavior, most behavior-modification programs merely arrange special contingencies in a special environment to eliminate the "problem" behavior. Even when the problem behavior is as widespread as alcoholism and crime, behavior modifiers focus on "fixing" the alcoholic and the criminal, not on changing the societal contingencies that prevail outside the therapeutic environment and continue to produce alcoholics and criminals. The contingencies that shape this method of dealing with behavioral problems are also analyzed, and this analysis leads to a criticism of the current social structure as a behavior control system. Although applied behaviorists have frequently focused on fixing individuals, the science of Behaviorism provides the means to analyze the structures, the system, and the forms of societal control that produce the "problems".