WHAT ARE THE PROS AND CONS?
For and against alternative punishments
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By aggravating the factors associated with re-offending, prison sentences can prove counter-productive as a contribution to crime reduction and public safety. Social Exclusion Unit Report |
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Short custodial sentences... can make things worse. The cycle of offending behaviour is more likely to be perpetuated if offenders lose their job or their home and their family ties are broken. David Blunkett |
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Doing unpaid labour for 240 hours or any significant number of hours is a deprivation of liberty and is a serious punishment. Lord Bingham |
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My knowledge and connections increased while I was inside. People tell you what they've done and how they've done it, and what the downsides are, so you can calculate whether the risk is worth taking. Ashley, 34. Imprisoned for theft, Ashley was sent to prison again, for fraud and deception.
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Many things can be done as far as offenders are concerned without sending them to prison which actually provides better safeguards for the public. Lord Chief Justice Woolf |
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For: Alternatives can be better at reducing re-offending
The most effective community supervision programmes have been shown to reduce offending 15% more than a prison sentence. Although there is still a lack of clear information (the Home Affairs Select Committee in 1998 found "the absence of rigorous assessment astonishing"), there is an increasing amount of evidence as to the effectiveness of community penalties - evidence which is being used to guide and create new schemes.
It costs, according to the latest estimates, £37,500 per year to lock someone in prison. (Or £42,000 for a young offender). Costs of community sentences vary, but the most frequently used orders cost between £2,000 and £4,000. The basic fact is that prison is about twelve times more expensive than a community sentence.
Alternatives can require offenders to pay back for their crimes through reparation and community service and help them learn better ways to live. They can be challenging and don't confirm anti-social behaviour the way prison does.
Putting an offender into jail will bring them into contact with a large number of other criminals, many of them with much more experience. Community sentences are less likely to place offenders in a situation where they simply learn from one another how best to offend.
Prisons take offenders far away from their homes, families and friends. Two thirds of those in prison lose their jobs, around a third also lose their homes. 40 per cent of prisoners lose contact with their families. All of these factors significantly increase the likelihood of reoffending.
Prison is an immediate, easily understood punishment. Following the sentence, the convicted criminal is immediately escorted out of the courtroom, placed in the prison van and to be taken behind the high walls of the prison. No other sentence is seen to have this immediacy. However, immediacy is not the same as effectiveness and quick responses to a problem are not always the best ones.
Prison is the only way of ensuring that criminals are taken out of circulation. Alternatives to prison, by their very nature, are riskier. The offender is, after all, still 'on the street', and the public are still at risk of reoffending. However, the majority of offences committed by those on probation are minor ones. In 2001 among offenders supervised by the probation service (on community sentences or after release from prison) there were 162 convictions for the most serious crimes - about one in a thousand of those starting supervision in that year. We should also remember that, with only a handful of exceptions, every prison sentence is a 'pre-release' sentence. At some point that prisoner will be freed. And nearly 60% of them will reoffend.
Alternatives to custody are not a 'soft option'. Indeed a short prison service may make no demands of the prisoner other than to behave themselves in prison. Rigorous community programmes can often be more challenging and demanding. They are not soft, but they are not as harsh as prison. Of course, the real question is whether people really benefit from harshness. For some people, prison is such a shock that it alters their behaviour. But for many it is simply a regime to be endured, or even a regime which they simply get used to.
Prison is a deeply unpleasant place. Being in prison is a badge of shame, and society needs to feel that those who break the rules have been shamed. There is a strong sense that victims have the right to see the offenders punished in this way. Community sentences are no badge of honour, but they can never compete with prison in this field.
Prison is the most serious punishment that society can inflict and is therefore often seen as a kind of barometer of how seriously society - and the government - takes crime. It serves as a high-profile 'warning'. Community sentences take crime just as seriously in that they too aim to stop the offender reoffending. But they certainly lack the symbolic power of a prison sentence.
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