A sloppy analogy without a lot of details that just popped into my brain, I think of it kinda like a military’s basic training camps/bases/postings.

You take a group of people and sequester them in a place where they’re under a fair amount of observation and sheepherding. A pretty set mandatory routine, ideological education, basic education, technical education, exercise, free time, meals, personal hygiene, sleep. As time passes and the opinions of the educators/trainers as well as any objective measures that could be developed would give the re-educated person the opportunity to move on to different areas where there are gradually less restrictions until it is decided that the folks can be allowed back into society. Transition and placement services for the “graduates” should exist to aid these new members of society.

Those that fail, can just stay in the system until they pass.

Those that refuse can just be kept in the system until they get tired of refusing or until they get to an age that it can be considered of little risk to allow them back into society.

You teach people to read, to write, to learn productive skills that can be used in society.

All ideological thought ultimately derives from responses to material reality. Reactionary thought in particular tends to derive from one of two places: worsening material conditions with no theory to guide a response, or being so insulated from the average standard of living that it ceases to meaningfully exist for that person. In any sort of re-education program you’d have to resolve both of these. The former is pretty easy given we’re communists: improve material conditions for people universally and spread theory to make it clear why they were in shit situations to begin with despite living in what is objectively the wealthiest empire in history and how this contradiction was resolved with socialist planning. Some reactionaries will likely need the theory half of that to hit them a little more forcefully than simply printing pamplets and will undoubtedly pull an adventurism against any burgeoning socialist state and need to be imprisoned until it clicks for them, which is what :gulag: is for.

The reactionaries that are too insulated by wealth and privilege to reasonably understand what life is actually like for most people get the Puyi treatment: make them go break rocks and read theory and talk to real human beings who suffered under the system they perpetuated until they experience a “oh fuck I did this” moment, at which point they can go be normal citizens like everyone else.

There is no such thing as non-coercive coercion. Coercion is not necessarily bad, especially when coercing people into being good.

Cuba already has a re-education plan built into its prison system. It’s called Plan Progresivo and is generally considered one of the more humane prison systems in the world.