Undoubtedly, this concept instead has an instrumental value, since it does not reflect the existing dispute (identified above) regarding the content of activities constituting treatment. Those objectives include that the convicted person acquire the capacity to understand and respect the law, thus ensuring their adequate social reinsertion (Article 1, Law 24,660).
īeyond the ambiguity of that expression, there is a certain consensus in which it is understood as a set of activities that should be offered to the incarcerated person, which aim to achieve the objectives laid out by Argentine criminal law. Francisco Bueno Arús has correctly differentiated the two notions: “A lack of resources leads to supplanting treatment with the ‘ideology of treatment’, which distorts the realist terms in which the offer to the prisoner of means that would allow them to overcome their socialization conflicts and carry out a future ‘life without crime’ and, in fact, replaces it with unsubstantiated faith in the program of activities aimed at overcoming values, which can oscillate between a contentless utopia and the illicit invasion of a person’s intimacy”. However, behind this debate lies a confusion of terms: the possible offer of treatment programs is seen as synonymous with the so-called ideology of treatment, a theoretical model that – erroneously (as we will see below) – reduced the concept to therapeutic interventions derived from behaviorism, according to which logic, the author of the crime appeared as a negative and dysfunctional element for the social system and therapy was thus the only means for achieving the miracle of rehabilitation. The latter oppose it based on the inconsistencies of the legal text itself…, the role of treatment as a disciplinary instrument…, the ideological connotations of intervention…, even including its contradictions and irregularities… or its contribution to the ‘devaluation’ of fundamental rights”. The former, usually those with some responsibility for its implementation, exalt the purpose and brag about programs and their supposed results. Rivera Beiras has acutely raised the issue in the following terms: “treatment has… a special role in the dialectical struggle between those who support the current form of intervention and those who criticize it. It is not lost on us that, those critiques of attempts to achieve resocialization also carry a certain mistrust of the idea of treatment.
However, and despite the seriousness of those objections, it is clear that the State must offer some sort of treatment, oriented toward achieving those objectives, to a person who is deprived of their freedom (in fulfillment of a sentence). Everyone knows the diverse critiques – that come from different conceptions of Criminology – of the objective of resocialization.
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