Suddenly it’s become fashionable to see ending short term sentences as common sense. Alex Massie is the latest victim of this strange policy meme. He praises “the presumption that prison sentences of fewer than three months are generally to be avoided on the reasonable grounds that they don’t do much good for or to anyone”.
This is quite an odd argument. You need to be a fairly bad person to get a prison sentence – however short – that does at least protect society. But the unspoken argument is that short sentences fail because offenders quite often go on to re-offend. So community-based punishment would be better. The difficulty with this argument is that it flies in the face of the facts. Scottish Government statisticians have analysed reconviction rates and concluded that “the number of previous convictions held by an offender appeared to be the dominant factor in terms of likelihood of reconviction”.
Put simply, people on short sentences re-offend because they are repeat offenders. Now those are exactly the kind of people the public think should be in jail. And I, for one, agree with them.
How many Straw Men must one wrestle simultaneously? John's argument seems to refute itself even on its own terms. He admits that short-term sentences do nothing to deter future criminality (this is bad and unfortunate) while insisting that short-term sentences are better than any alternative measures even if, as he acknowledges, repeat offenders are likely to reoffend because they are not discouraged by short-term imprisonment and can swiftly, therefore, return to their criminal ways.
This is not ideal. For the record, I have no problem with banging up repeat offenders for quite some time. But the notion that being in favour of reducing the prison population means one must be "soft" on defendents seems a stretch.
Then again, this is but an honest disagreement. John is a good chap and right on some things. But he has a much more generous view of the police than I do.
Previous
John
July 2nd, 2010 8:38am Report this commentEven if a repeat offender will go on to commit crimes after their six month sentence, this at least gives the victims a six month break. It may even be cost effective.
David Booth
July 2nd, 2010 9:12am Report this commentWatching Ken Clarke, surrounded by a group of thuggish young men on one of his prison visits I was struck by the bizarre nature of the prisoners comments.
The young men were tut tutting and agreeing with Mr Clarke about the failure of prisons as if they were just innocent bystanders in their own situation rather than the authors of their own misfortune and incompetent criminals to boot.
Community sentences only work if the convicted person co-operates with the sentences.
Prison works because the convicted individual will be out of circulation for a period of time unable to continue his crime of choice.
Re-offending rates only drop when the incompetent criminally minded individual realizes it's a mugs game and grows up and starts to get a life.
Colin Cumner
July 2nd, 2010 9:53am Report this commentThe current system of sending people to prison for crimes against society may not be perfect but it's the least imperfect scheme we know. We've all seen the results of the 'softly softly' approach - even more criminal activity.
fifer
July 2nd, 2010 10:31am Report this commentIt rather depends on what someone's being imprisoned for. There was a case a couple of years back, gleefully pounced upon by the Scottish press, of an archetypical City trader type who'd been caught doing something over 150mph in a 911 Turbo on the ever-popular A9 from Perth to Inverness (the site of a fair number of speeding records over the years). The comedy value at the time was that his defence was that his 911 would stop much faster from 150mph than some oik's Ford Escort would from 70. Cue much laughter and a prison sentence of 6 months (from memory).
My guess would be that his case cost the state:
- £10k in process costs from the point of arrest
- £20k in imprisonment costs (I seem to remember the cost working out at £40k pa)
- £20k in lost income tax / NI (assuming he wasn't being paid whilst inside)
- plus all the consumption taxes he'd have incurred in a 6 month period
So it probably cost us £50k to put him away. Had we, on the other hand, taken his car (as the Swiss do) and auctioned it for £80k (assuming a newish 911 Turbo) and banned him from driving for 3 years, as a society we're £70k up on the deal, no less safe because he's not allowed to drive anyway, and anyone else who might be thinking about it will be put off by a fine of effectively £80k.
Violent crime is, of course, a different matter, but why we don't just try to extract the maximum amount of money possible from criminals has always escaped me.
Indy
July 2nd, 2010 12:26pm Report this commentThe comment "We've all seen the results of the 'softly softly' approach - even more criminal activity" kind of sums up the madness of this debate.
There are now more people in prison in the UK than there have ever been in recorded history.
Yet people like this commenter genuinely believe that we have a "softly softly" approach to penal policy.
When you are dealing with such a crazy contradiction between fact and perception it takes a brave politician to stand on the side of fact.
Good luck Ken Clarke - you're going to need it!
David Bouvier
July 2nd, 2010 2:23pm Report this commentAlex - I have mixed feelings about this...
There is some good corroboration of the idea that locking up people from the small group who commit the mass of middle-of-the-road burglarly-type crimes does seem to give respite to communities.
That said, certainly at some times it is not being a "pretty bad person" that gets you put away - it was atleast for women not having a TV license and not paying the fines that came with being to ill-educated not to fall the license-men's dubious methods of gaining evidence.
The cited report also includes in its summary:
"3.12 For offenders discharged from custody, reconviction rates varied with sentence length, those with shorter sentences being more likely to be reconvicted. 74 per cent of those with a sentence of 6 months or less had a subsequent reconviction within two years, compared with 27 per cent for those with a sentence of four years or more. 54 per cent of those who had a sentence of 6 months or less had a subsequent custodial reconviction within two years, compared to 17 per cent for offenders discharged from a sentence of four years or more" though they note that the data is contaminated by "pseudo-reconvictions" for crimes committed prior to the original conviction which reduces the degree of this.
D
RichardH
July 2nd, 2010 3:05pm Report this commentIndy -
'why we don't just try to extract the maximum amount of money possible from criminals has always escaped me.'
Because then crime becomes the prerogative of the poor. Nothing to lose, nothing to fear. Is it right that if a rich and poor person commit the same crime, one loses masses of disposable income and the other loses nothing?
As a country we send a fraction of the number of criminals to prison than other countries. E.g. Spain - 9 times as many convicted go to prison than here. Now it could just be a coincidence our crime rate is several times theirs, but I doubt it.
Snowman
July 2nd, 2010 6:13pm Report this commentPrisons don’t work in that they do bugger all to stop re-offending, the miscreants don’t feel any pain – physical, mental, financial. If we did as fifer @ 10.31 suggests it would be by far more effective in stopping City yobs driving their cars fast, or the likes of Lord Archer lying.
Prisons could be said to be working only in a sense that when down the miscreant cannot commit crime. It may be equally effective but cheaper to let him have a day job (if he’s in employment when caught), and then confine him to his abode for the night.
Back to top