Religious education in penal institutions: A study on juvenile closed penal institutions and juvenile reformatories

It appears that crime, which coexists with man, will continue to exist as long as man does. This affects every country, region, society, gender, and age group. This experience and circumstance demonstrate that it is a worldwide phenomenon. As a result, while eradicating crime is the ideal goal for humanity, the primary goal is to diminish it. However, if specific instances are taken into account, it has been demonstrated in the historical process that reducing crime has not been possible. On the contrary, crime multiplied day by day, to the point that it became an epidemic and began to pose an existential threat to all humanity. This epidemic primarily affects children who have not completed their bio-psycho-social development and have not attained sufficient maturity. Children, to put it in geological terms, are social fault lines from this perspective. In fact, the number of children dragged into crime is rising every day, while the age at which they are dragged into crime is dropping. As a result of this pattern, societies have sought out numerous forms of punishment. These investigations have progressed from a desire for vengeance to a desire to educate and rehabilitate convicts into society. In today's world, the goal of incarceration is to "provide general and particular prevention, to reinforce the factors that prevent the convict from committing future crimes, to protect society against crime, to encourage the convict to resocialize, and to facilitate the convict's adaptation into a productive and responsible lifestyle in compliance with laws, orders, and social rules," rather than to punish the convict. This idea, which has been successfully implemented in Turkish penal institutions (PIs) since the 2000s, has now achieved a pinnacle. Children deserve this understanding the most, since they are more open, closer, and receptive to education, change, transformation, and redirection than adults, and are pushed to crime for psychosocial and pedagogical reasons. To make the aforementioned notion prominent in juvenile PIs, the State of the Republic of Turkey classifies these institutions as "education-based" institutions. In other words, the juvenile criminal justice system (CJS) and its policies are built on the foundation of education and rehabilitation activities. Religious education/spiritual guidance (SRG) is one of these activities, possibly the first. The purpose of the present study is to conduct a general evaluation of religious education/SRG activities in juvenile closed PIs and juvenile reformatories, as well as to develop scientific suggestions on the subject. Keywords: Juvenile closed penal institution, juvenile reformatory, crime, delinquency, punishment, education and correction, religious education/SRG, religious resocialization.