SOME ASPECTS OF ORGANIZING ADULT EDUCATION AT PENITENTIARIES IN EUROPE

Introduction. Adult education and training becomes more and more important under the conditions of modern knowledge society. Persons released after finishing their penitentiary sentence must undergo a hard process of reintegration in society, that is, to find a job and resume relations with their families. So far as the technical progress is continuing, even a few years spent in isolation from society can place obstacles in the way of prisoners' resocialization. Therefore, it is very important to study the experience of the developed European countries in creating environment and opportunities for returning ex-prisoners to society, one of the tools for that being their education and training during serving their sentence. Purpose. The purpose of the article is to analyse some aspects of adult education in penitential establishments of Europe and find out new examples and possibilities of the provision of education and training in prisons. Results. Principles of adult education have been developed since the middle of the 20th century. Nevertheless, they have been applied mostly to education and training of law-abiding citizens, and insufficiently to prisoners, because there exist many obstacles on the way of in-prison education in general. These obstacles occur mainly due to prisoners' forced isolation from society in general and from family and labour market in particular. The task of socialization of these people can be resolved by providing a broad curriculum for in-prison education and training including simultaneous acquiring basic literacy skills, vocational skills and motivation. All those are equally important, since prisoners' further reintegration into society cannot be brought into effect without being functionally literate, competitive in labour market and self-esteem in achieving their goals, which should be motivating and real. Originality. Some aspects of adult education in European prisons have been thoroughly analysed; the approaches to the problem, namely, combined programs with broad curriculum for prisoners, have been described. Conclusions. Nowadays, in economically developed European countries, education and training in penitentiaries have become particularly significant. This process no longer means simple acquiring skills of functional literacy (reading, writing, counting), or vocational skills. Nowadays, it contains both mentioned above and, in addition, the third constituent part of the process, namely, the development of motivation, which should increase the self-esteem of penitentiary inmates for their further competitiveness on the labour market after several years of isolation from rapidly developing society. Such broad curricula containing all three components can lead to full resocialization of ex-prisoners into society. The generalized experience of different European countries can be extremely useful in Ukrainian penitentiaries, so further research on the problem is advisable.