Violence among the adolescents and adolescent delinquency often results in criminal charges and 14-18 year olds end up in the penitentiary facility. By the year 2005 only 26 adolescents were serving sentence in special juvenile facilities; however from 2006 onwards their number has increased drastically. At times the numbers of inmates reached 200, while today 162 juveniles are serving sentence. The rise of juvenile crime has become a debate issue for various groups of the Georgian society – education experts, psychologists, politicians are looking for the reasons of the situation at hand.
We attempted a study of the demographic, social and academic profiles of adolescent inmates (the study of the Ministry of Education and Science, 2009), also taking into account our 5-year practice of working with juvenile convicts, which was aimed at supporting their resocialization and future reintegration into the society. In this work we will present a psychosocial portrait of an adolescent in the penitentiary system and consider the particular stress-factors that affect the juveniles and are determined by the specific features of the Georgian criminal subculture. We will also present 5 psychotypes of the adolescents in conflict with the law that were determined by the Freiburg personality test and will try to describe the self perception of the convicts while in confinement and after their sentence is served.
In this work we will also describe and analyze the rehabilitation activities conducted by us, which entail: gain or recovery of basic trust, overcoming the non-constructive patterns of behaviour, working on the self-concept of the convicts, overcoming the destructive beliefs about oneself and the world, working on self-esteem and finding new resources inside oneself, working on the values of the juveniles in conflict with the law, finding out and understanding the genesis of one’s own crime, etc.
By generalizing our experience, we will try to present concrete recommendations which will foster the implementation of new resocialization services for juvenile convicts in the penitentiary system.
