REVIEWS
| Date | 01 November 1993 |
| Published date | 01 November 1993 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1993.tb01917.x |
REVIEWS
James
M.
Byme, Arthur J. Lurigio
and
Joan Petersilia,
Smart Sentencing,
London: Sage,
1992,
xv
+
352
pp, hb
E33.00,
pb
E15.95.
Maeve
W.
McMahon,
The Persistent Prison? Rethinking Decarceration and
Penal Reform,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1993,
xxvi
+
234
pp, hb
E32.50,
pb
213.00.
Smart Sentencing
(what a dreadful title) reviews the emergence of ‘intermediate
sanctions’ in the United States over the last decade. Chapters contributed by a
range of authors deal with intensive probation supervision (IPS), home
confinement, electronic monitoring, boot camps (or ‘shock incarceration’: where
have we heard that idea before?), and with further development of fines and
community service orders. Much of the material in
The Persistent Prison?
is also
concerned with intermediate sanctions, or ‘community corrections,
’
as they are
there referred to. McMahon’s study is confined to criminal justice trends in one
jurisdiction: Ontario. There are, of course, numerous parallels between the
developments considered in these books and changes in England and Wales over
the same period. At the time of writing this review, the courts and the probation
service are struggling here to put into practice the considerable changes to
community sentences brought about by the Criminal Justice Act
1991.
How can the increasing emphasis upon, and scale of changes to, community
corrections in recent years best be explained? In the United States, traditionally,
there has been little development of intermediate sanctions, with sentencers being
left in many cases with a stark choice between imprisonment and basic probation.
The non-emergence of the fine as a significant sentencing option in the United
States, while it is the mainstay in so many other jurisdictions, seems never to have
been satisfactorily explained. Now this is changing too. Why the move to
community corrections? One reason is a belated recognition that intermediate
options are required between the two extremes of prison and probation, and that
‘developing an array of sentencing options is an important and necessary first step
towards a more comprehensive and graduated sentencing structure’
(The Persistent
Prison?,
p xiv). This is the attempt to apply desert principles to community
sentences, but, as
so
often in criminal justice reform, theory lags behind practice.
The most consistent message from the authors of
Smart Sentencing,
from their
different perspectives, is that the central reason for community sanctions
development is the need for fiscal restraint on the burgeoning prison population.
When reading these books, comparisons between
North
America, and England
and Wales, are inevitable. What is said here about unit fines and about electronic
monitoring is of particular interest. There are now several well-thought-out and
ongoing day-fine projects in the United States. The best documented is the scheme
operational in Staten Island. Various studies report more realistic fine levels
imposed, achieved at the same time as increased revenue from fines and lower
default rates.
So
Chapter Eight on ‘The Use of Fines as an Intermediate Sanction’
in
Smart Sentencing
makes depressing reading, since these same optimistic results
0
The Modem Law Review Limited
1993
(MLR
56:6,
November). Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108
Cowley Road, Oxford
OX4
IJF
and
238
Main Street, Cambridge, MA
02142,
USA.
906
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