Role of Religious Interventions in the Reintegration of Prisoners: A Case Study of Selected Jails of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

Prisoners’ reintegration is the core concept of almost all penal systems in the world. One of the potent tools to ensure prisoners’ reintegration is effective network of religious services within prisons. This paper aims at exploring the role of religious interventions in the reintegration of prisoners with specific focus on Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) jails.  Six high profile jails---Central Jail Peshawar, Haripur, Bannu, and District Jail Timergara, Mardan and Kohat of KP were purposively selected. Mixed methodology, more specifically concurrent triangulation technique, was used to collect and analyze the data. Of all 261 respondents, 250 comprised of jail inmates (under-trial and convicted adults and juveniles male prisoners) were randomly selected within the six jails of the province and interviewed through semi-structured questionnaire. The remaining 11 respondents, purposively selected and interviewed through interview-guide included jail officials of all the selected prisons (6 in numbers) and ex-prisoners (5 in numbers). It was found that a clear majority of the respondents considered religious interventions instrumental in accomplishing the goal of prisoners’ reintegration i.e, making them law abiding, productive, contributing and pro-social citizens. Many of the apparently incorrigible and potentially dangerous prisoners altered the course of their lives once they went through religious programs inside prisons. It was also discovered that in KP prisons, there was no effective network of chaplaincy services, and often these services were provided by self-motivated religious prisoners and rarely by the prison management with the collaboration of NGOs.  Yet, the existing religious interventions had an extraordinary impact in terms of reforming the inmates. Hence, it is recommended that any prisons’ reform strategy must incorporate a well-designed framework of religious programs to transform criminals into an asset for society.

General Inequalities for Generalized Convex Functions

It is a fact that, the theory of inequalities, priding on a history of more than two cen- turies, plays a significant role in almost all fields of mathematics and in major areas of science. In the present dissertation, we will study the general inequalities, namely integral inequalities and discrete inequalities for generalized convex functions. There- fore, we will introduce some generalized convex functions which include functions −convex functions, and n−convex func- with nondecreasing increments, ∆− and tions of higher orders. By using these functions, we will provide a generalization of the Brunk’s theorem, of the Levinson-type inequalities, of the Burkill-Mirsky-Peˇari ́’s re- c c sult and of the result related to arithmetic integral mean. We will also discuss the Popoviciu-type characterization of positivity of sums and integrals for higher order convex functions of n variables and we will give some related results. Our disserta- tion also provides generalizations of some of the celebrated and fundamental identities ˇ and inequalities including Montgomery’s identities, Ostrowski-, Gr ̈ss-, Cebyˇev- and u s Fan-type inequalities. Moreover, we will also apply an elegant method of producing n−exponentially and logarithmically convex functions for positive linear function- als constructed with the help of majorization-type results, Favard-, Berwald- and Jensen-type inequalities. The generalization and the following refinements of Jensen- Mercer’s inequalities are also provided with some applications. The Lagrange- and Cauchy-type mean value theorems are also proved and shown to be useful in studying Stolarsky-type means defined for the positive linear functionals.