If not prison, then what?
| Author | Sampson, Adam |
| Position | Crime and punishment - Analysis of criminal justice policy |
It has been a while since I last had the opportunity to write about alternatives to custody. I cut my campaigning teeth as Deputy Director of the Prison Reform Trust in the (what in retrospect appear to have been) heady days of the early 1990s when, in the aftermath of the riots in 1990 in Strangeways and another twenty-five prisons, and the 1991 Criminal Justice Act, the use of custody fell out of fashion. In those days, even at the height of Thatcherism and with a press as resolutely populist as it is now-it is worth remembering that serious attempts to reintroduce capital punishment were a yearly parliamentary ritual-there was a progressive consensus in favour of capping the use of imprisonment and promoting non-custodial sentencing. Prison was out; community sentencing and diversion from custody were in. For the first time in decades, the prison population went into reverse, dipping to the low 40,000s. The uneasy alliance between radical Labour and patrician Tories in favour of a liberal approach to the treatment of offenders had, it seemed, won the day.
Over the next decade, my career took me inexorably away from the issue. It was not until I joined Shelter that I began to involve myself again in criminal justice policy. I therefore missed the rapid replacement of that short-lived consensus with a return to increasingly punitive sentencing and the inexorable rise in the size of the prison population. The proportion of those convicted in court imprisoned rather than given community sentences, the average length of sentence, the proportion of sentences breached and released prisoners recalled-all have increased. So what went wrong? What happened to the idea of alternatives to custody? What place should they have in a progressive approach to law and order?
The move away from community sentencing was sudden. The attack on the 1991 Criminal Justice Act began almost before it was implemented. The operation of the fines regime, which attempted to introduce some relationship between the level of fine levied and the wealth of the individual being fined, attracted immediate press attention. A media and political assault on other provisions followed and, as the memory of the overcrowding-led prison riots faded, sentencing again began to harden and the rise of the prison population resumed.
But the policies enshrined in the act had not failed; they had scarcely had time to do so. What had changed was the politics. The appointment of Tony Blair as shadow home secretary following the 1992 election proved a watershed. Steeped in the learning from the Clinton election, Blair acted quickly to move the Labour Party's policy on criminal justice to the right in order to neutralise it as a political issue. Just a few years after Douglas Hurd and Roy Hattersley had competed to prove their liberal credentials, Blair and Howard were engaged in a ferocious contest to show how tough they were prepared to be on crime. Sentencers responded to what they perceived to be the new consensus (sentencing behaviour is far more influenced by perceived public mood than by mere legislation), and began sharply to increase their use of imprisonment, denying more bail applications, reducing the number of people given community sentences, and increasing the average length of sentence. Long before most of its provisions were repealed by its successors, the 1991 Criminal Justice Act was effectively dead.
But the new toughness has not meant the death of the community penalty. Far from it. We are-not unreasonably-used to thinking of the main feature of sentencing practice over the past decade as being the explosion in the number of prisoners, with a doubling in the number of prison sentences passed between 1992 and 2002 and a significant rise in the average length of sentence. But that rise is matched by the expansion in the number of people sentenced to supervision in the community. In 1992 courts in England and Wales imposed 102,000 community sentences. The equivalent figure in 2002 was 187,100.
The rise in the number of offenders given community penalties has not been the result of a significant rise in the number of people convicted by the courts or an increase in the seriousness of their offending. The reasons are more complex. First, the desperate search for innovation, for penalties which could convince the public that politicians were doing something about crime...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
