The tough US sentencing model appeals to the vengeance-hungry British press, but rehabilitation is the key to tacking crime
Mark Johnson The Guardian, Wednesday 18 May 2011
When the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) released figures this month comparing reoffending rates, commentators fell over each other jumping to conclusions. According to the MoJ, longer sentences (of two to four years) resulted in a lower rate of reoffending than shorter sentences. Community orders and suspended sentences also led to less reoffending than sentences of under a year, but most newspapers chose to ignore any fact which might have obstructed their inalienable right to call for stiffer sentencing.
The biggest predictor of reoffending is not length of sentence but age. Inmates released after a four-year term are older and their offending goes down accordingly. They have also had the benefit of interventions which those serving short sentences do not enjoy. In addition, they are supported on release by an offender manager.
The MoJ research could have confounded the pundits if it had investigated other factors. For instance, when services are extended to provide help finding jobs and housing on release, reoffending drops. This is true whatever the length of sentence. It is also proven that facilitating consistent family contact during a sentence increases the chance of successful resettlement: this, too, is unrelated to length of sentence.
Since the figures prompted predictable calls for more sentences, longer sentences and tougher jails, let's look at a nation where exactly that formula has been applied. The US began to follow the path now prescribed by British commentators at the end of the last century.
Where has it led them? Well, first to the highest incarceration rate in the world. According to research by King's College London, in 2009 there were almost 2.3 million Americans in jail: that is more than 756 prisoners for every 100,000 citizens compared with 153 in England and Wales – and our own incarceration rate is high compared with most of Europe.
Thanks to a zero-tolerance approach to drugs and a policy of three strikes and you're in (for life!), petty criminals and small-time drug dealers are incarcerated for the long-term with the dangerous and violent. Most people who study prisons agree that a stay in a US penitentiary is a horrific experience but there is, shamefully, no overall monitoring body to assess levels of assault and abuse within jails. An insider study of one anonymous prison discovered that over 20% of inmates had been raped. In some states it is legal to use dogs not just to sniff out drugs but to attack non-compliant inmates.
Click here to read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/may/18/long-prison-sentences-fail-offenders-society?CMP=twt_gu
No comments:
Post a Comment