Incarceration for Reformation or Deformation?

The reason for imposing incarceration is to punish offenders for violating societal norms and values. As a means of punishment, it is deliberately inflicted on an offender, which serves as a deterrence to would-be offenders. This could help in inculcating good morals on offenders, thereby altering him or her from a nonconforming individual to a conforming one. Despite the good intention of imposing incarceration, it has contradicted its cardinal objective which has resulted in some unintended consequences such as inability to secure employment as a result of stigmatization, aiding the collapse of marriages among others. With the above-stated consequences of incarceration, penal institutions instead of instilling the positive goal of incarceration on inmates, on the contrary, it has served as a punishment ground with degrading treatment imposed on inmates by correctional officials coupled with the dehumanizing state of most penal institutions. This article concludes that incarceration has a long term effect on the positive life of offenders and recommends that concerted efforts should be made in reintegrating ex-offenders, discouraging the idea of tagging, and make ample efforts on how ex-offenders can secure payable jobs upon regaining freedom.

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International Heritage Law for Communities

10.1093/oso/9780198843306.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Lucas Lixinski

Keyword(s):

Cultural Heritage ◽

Local Communities ◽

Unintended Consequences ◽

Decision Making Processes ◽

The Common ◽

Negative Impacts ◽

The Relationship ◽

Blind Spots ◽

Made In

This book critically engages the shortcomings of the field of international heritage law, seen through the lenses of the five major UNESCO treaties for the safeguarding of different types of heritage. It argues that these five treaties have, by design or in their implementation, effectively prevented local communities, who bear the brunt of the costs associated with international heritage protection, from having a say in how their heritage is managed. The exclusion of local communities often alienates them not only from international decision-making processes but also from their cultural heritage itself, ultimately meaning that systems put in place for the protection of cultural heritage contribute to its disappearance in the long term. The book adds to existing literature by looking at these UNESCO treaties not as isolated regimes, which is the common practice in the field, but rather as belonging to a discursive continuum on cultural heritage. Rather than scrutinizing the regimes themselves, the book focuses on themes that cut across the relevant UNESCO regimes, such as the use of expert rule in international heritage law, economics, and the relationship between heritage and the environment. It uses this mechanism to highlight the blind spots and unintended consequences of UNESCO treaties and how choices made in their drafting have continuing and potentially negative impacts on how we think about and safeguard heritage. The book is of interest to cultural heritage scholars and practitioners across all disciplines, as well as to international lawyers interested in the dynamics of fragmented subfields.

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