On Several Issues Of Chinese Contemporary Offender Ideological Education

The crime is an inevitable phenomenon in the society development, which brings some harms and losses to people. So the society need punish the crime to adhere to social justice and protect citizens’ legitimate rights. At the same time, the society is supposed to correct and educate the offender, to bring about justice for the offender. The ideological education refers to the education in prison to change the offender’s crime thoughts and correct his psychology and activities, in order to realize resocialization of the offender, and help the offender return to the normal social life.Retribution is the goal and the legitimacy basis of the penalty. However, in modern society, the ideological education should play a leading role in the rehabilitation, so as to transform the offender into law-abider, and protect the human rights of the offender. Due to the influence of Chinese traditional doctrine of severe punishment, people tend to regard punishment and deprivation as the most important work in the prison. The pressure from the prison security and the offender labors makes ideological education squashed ceaselessly, which causes inefficiency in the traditional offender ideological education as well as difficulties in reforming the methods of correction. Therefore, the ideological education has been marginalized. In the social background of the rule of law, administration according to law is an important principle of the innovation of the prison work. The rule of law requires the prison work to maintain social justice and protect the legitimate rights of the offender. Hence the prison should aim at rehabilitation, which may be achieved by developing new ideas and improving the working mechanism, to ensure the ideological education in the dominant position in rehabilitation work.The demand is the need for the external condition and the motivation of behavior. The satisfaction of reasonable needs of the offender can inspire them. The contents of the traditional ideological education are composed of the laws, the ethics and the situation-policy-future education. Such education contents ignore individual characteristics and criminal motivations of the offender, and are far away from their life. Because traditional education cannot meet the actual needs of the offender, it fails to stimulate the rehabilitation enthusiasm of the offender. The rehabilitation demands are about letting the offender pull through the prison life smoothly, changing the criminal ideas, and becoming a sound social citizen after being released from the prison. The contents of offender ideological education should be based on rehabilitation demands and be built around the rehabilitation goal. In order to meet the needs of serving a sentence, the needs of reformation and the needs of adapting to the society, the prison should carry out the frustration education, the prison norms education, the prison life education, the psychological treatment, cognize connection and the society adaption education.The prison is the main law enforcement agency of execution of freedom penalty. The method of freedom penalty is the imprisonment penalty, while the purpose of the penalty is to return to the society. So there is a paradox between its means and its purpose, leading to the serious emergence of recidivism as well as deterioration in psychiatric symptoms of offenders. Compelling rehabilitation results in the development of the prison personality of the offender without independence and autonomy. Closed environment causes prison–subculture, and creates mutual infection among offenders. In addition, a long term of isolation imprisonment results in social maladjustment after being released from prison. To solve the above paradox, the ideological education should be socialized. With the help of educating by social forces, a variety of educational activities can be carried out and the negative impacts of imprisonment can be reduced. Therefore, the prison policeman should change the idea, strengthen the volunteer teams, perfect penalty execution system, to promote the socialization of the offender ideological education.Because of the special identity and status of the offender, and the influence of the traditional thoughts on punishment and deprivation, in the ideological education, the offender has been treated as the object and his subjectivity has been suppressed, which leads to instrumentalization and formalization. With the enhancement of the subject consciousness and the consolidation of human right consciousness, the subjectivity of the offender has received more and more attention. In the ideological education, the prison policeman should establish the idea of respect, trust and spirit of service, set up the interactive relationship to realize the equal communication in the process of the education, build experience education model to get life experience in direct participation for the offender, and improve the management system to stimulate the enthusiasm of the offender in the rehabilitation. In addition, the offender should be encouraged to carry out self-education to enhance self-rehabilitation to promote ideological transformation and spiritual sublimation.. By this mean, good rehabilitation environment is created to inspire the subjectivity of the offender and improve the effectiveness of ideological education.