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The in-prison mentoring is an art in balancing techniques: participants are being challenged to reflect critically on their personal responsibilities and their previous patterns of behaviour, as well as to become open enough to plan and ask for the supports they will need once they are released, in the sense of doing something different when they are released that will in fact break the previous cycle and pattern of behaviour. The peer mentoring process can be explained as the input of a more experienced person, who serves as a role model and encourages, counsels and befriends a less skilled person for the purpose of promoting the professional and/or personal development. The offenders can become trained professionals, known as peer advisors or peer mentors. In the case of mentoring ex-prisoners, the impact of” successful ex-offenders” can help in creating new role models and mentors for newly released prisoners. The peer mentoring method is trying to create safer communities by teaching offenders to take responsibility for their actions with the help of their peers. The purpose of this article is to clarify the concept of peer mentoring and to analyze different methods of implementing this concept and studies approaching the concept of peer mentoring, in order for us to evaluate the impact of these programs. We will mainly study the peer-mentoring methods for prisoners and former prisoners used in United Kingdom.
Keywords: delinquency, peer mentoring, offenders, recidivism
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