The master's thesis will shed a general light on the field of education of prisoners and provide details on their motivations for education. It will also outline the obstacles that prisoners experience during studies and enrolling. They often find themselves excluded from social processes; however, education plays a major role for both society and prisoners. Although education brings many benefits, in Slovenia prisoners' involvement in the process is relatively low. The proportion of male convicts who have been involved in education between 2017 and 2021 ranges between 16,5 and 21,9 %. Among female convicts, the proportion is lower, ranging between 2,5 and 10,7 %. Based on these figures, we were interested in the reasons and motivations of prisoners for being involved in educational processes. We also sought to answer the question of barriers to education itself. We found that most prisoners choose education on the basis of coping better with everyday life after release, followed by learning new subjects, acquiring new skills or improving their self-esteem. The first motive is predominant for convicts with lower educational achievement (vocational or less); the second for convicts with secondary education or diploma. Most of the convicted persons who attend the training do not perceive any obstacles. Convicts who do not participate in these processes are most constrained by institutional barriers. We found that the experience of the latter decreases as the sentence increases, but the opposite is true for preferential barriers, which are experienced to the greatest extent by convicts with the highest sentences. The survey showed that the participants in education are more likely to be younger, to be serving higher prison sentences, to be serving their first sentence, to have at least a moderate understanding of Slovene and to be non-dependent on drugs or alcohol. Convicts who do not receive education but want to do so experience institutional and informational barriers to the greatest extent.
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