Social rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents plays an important role in maintaining public safety.
It requires special care and respect for the child’s unformed personality. This article summarizes
the experience of the Russian system of rehabilitation of juvenile offenders. It is emphasized that
the system is closed and standardized, which limits the possibilities of applying new technologies
in working with deviant and delinquent children. The goal of this study was to develop optimal
social technologies combining classical and innovative methods of rehabilitating juvenile offenders
and taking into account the specifics of closed institutions. The main research question was: what
new theoretical developments are effective in the rigid and inflexible conditions of these closed
institutions? Will they give steady positive results or does space itself block them? The pedagogical
experiment conducted by our research team is a unique attempt to go beyond traditional forms. It has
a classical scheme consisting of three successive stages: diagnostic, organizational, and evaluation.
Novelty is determined by the development and implementation of innovative technology to involve
juvenile offenders in voluntary activities in the following areas: environmental (development of
environmental awareness, planting trees and plants, caring for homeless animals, etc.), civil and
patriotic (design of exhibitions based on the results of search operations, care behind memorials,
the organization of festive concerts in for veterans), cultural and leisure (holding concerts, theatrical
performances, holidays for socially-unprotected categories of citizens). Volunteering promotes the
restoration of broken social bonds through self-awareness as a useful member of society. The use
of methods based on cognitive activity, creativity and creativity of children, the active involvement
of parents in the rehabilitation process, has achieved impressive results in learning, interpersonal
interaction, and most importantly – in self-awareness and self-presentation of children, which
society has traditionally become accustomed to writing off.