Promoting Health and Rehabilitation in Prisons: A Community Approach
Promoting Health and Rehabilitation in Prisons
The first obstacle is the resistance of the prison population, given their socio-psychological characteristics.
The processes will be motivating and lead with the subject itself.
Educational activities aimed at enabling the acquisition of knowledge will be very useful and should consider the individual as the primary resource for developing their own health. Therefore, the process should start from their demands and needs, using the endogenous potential of people.
Activities should empower the individuals themselves in the search for solutions to their problems from an “independent and critical awareness and a political vision of the shares.”
Thus, the actions to be carried out, compared to prevalent health problems in this environment, will also be more effective if they arise in the context of health promotion.
Participatory processes should be developed where the inmates give their own analysis and solutions from their context and take action to overcome them.
The teacher should facilitate these processes and potential, build confidence and motivation, using all the techniques of open dialogue.
- Strengthen community action: before, during, and after imprisonment. Role of volunteerism in promoting health in prisons.
For a community to intervene from itself, implies deeper into the four elements that constitute it: territory, population, demand, resources, and their interactions.
When designing a program, one must not forget that the community that is intended comes from another source community, where he will return at the end of the period.
We must take into account the common cultural features that make the community of persons deprived of liberty.
- Community Action before imprisonment:
Must start from the community of origin and do not forget that prison is, in most cases, the end of a series of failures in social protection in the overall development and socialization of the individual.
To break the circle “territory” prison-area factory factory “must” insert “to people before they have to” reintegrate “later.
This approach is sometimes ineffective.
- Community Action during imprisonment:
A community with cases of deprivation of liberty has indicators of “social disease.” Operations:
“Involvement of community groups and community workers in the protection and promotion of health.
The purpose, apart from the specific community, is to safeguard the link for true rehabilitation.
“Work in creating community awareness on domestic resources and to meet needs.
- Community action after entering prison:
When they return to their home communities, they are deficient in alternatives and opportunities to make changes in their lives.
To capitalize on the progress achieved during the stay, programs are needed for output and a less stigmatized and more comfortable with real offers access to health, education, housing, and employment.
The real social inclusion should be undertaken by the company itself, to be reinserted, herself in caring for the weak.
Activities undertaken at the Community level should be carried out with the person of the penal institution and continued after the stay in prison.
The volunteer acts in the process of empowering people and also plays the role of defending the interests and rights of inmates, that is, a mediating role.
The mediator bases its activities on the analysis and study of reality, planning their activities with a sense of complementarity with the professionals, acting out and creating a network to make society accessible to those who are isolated and break it exclusion.
- Creating an environment conducive to health.
- Physical environment: the new prisons have been built and existing ones renovated, with modern modular elements, away from urban areas and areas for health care, education, cultural and sports and leisure.
The environment is a determinant of health, and the real challenge is to conserve by raising the awareness of environmental care for the inmates.
- Social environment: the school management is to facilitate relationships between the occupants of the environment contribute to the objectives of rehabilitation or social reintegration.
Will promote the proper use of common areas as close as possible to what would normally at liberty.
A joint effort of NGOs bring their programs up trying to adapt to the realities and demands of the people to whom they are addressed.
Another important aspect is the internal organization and professional time and influence the operation of the communications department of the prison.
- Reorientation of services.
- Prison health care in recent years: In 1988, the Directorate General of Prisons began a reform of health care centers.
The reform consisted of the following lines:
-Creation of a comprehensive care system, with full-time professionals organized into teams of primary care. At the head of each department head will be a doctor.
-Establishment of a number of assistance programs and public health: prevention and control of communicable diseases, health education, and intervention with drug addiction.
“Establishing an integrated health information system in the rest of existing analog systems.
“Closer relations with the national health system, with the aim of integrating primary care into specialty care in prison extrapenitenciaria.
When a person enters a facility or prison, he underwent a health examination from which the individual detected health problems and subsequent interventions are initiated, and during the period of stay in prison, all prisoners can go to medical services.