The role of the infrastructure and the legal framework in reducing the effects produced by the criminal subculture of persons deprived of liberty

Abstract

The criminal subculture of people sentenced to prison produces negative effects in the prison environment, including segregation and social stratification of convicts, physical and mental abuse of certain categories of prisoners, resistance to the positive effects of resocialization actions, etc. Both theory and practice have already demonstrated that the destruction of subcultures cannot be achieved without attracting other more serious consequences, such as the formation of another subculture, but much more dangerous then the first. Under these conditions, a much more realistic objective is to weaken the effects of the subculture in the prison environment. In achieving this objective, the role of the infrastructure and the legal framework is extremely important. Moreover, in the case of the legal framework, we expressly state that it is useless without an implementation framework. In this article, we are going to explain the formation of the criminal subculture in penitentiary institutions including through infrastructural factors, and to argue that the laws for the execution of criminal sentences without a framework for their implementation have no purpose and