Better use of non-custodial sentences

Inadequate regimes

Prison overcrowding combined with labor shortage has left some prisons unable to provide adequate access to purposeful activities in terms of education, employment or training. Activities that are mandatory for rehabilitation and preparation for life outside prison. HM Prisons Chief Inspectorate stated that prisons are also increasing volatile and fail to prepare prisoners to return to the distant community achieve results for society.

Short term solutions

A number of short-term solutions were enacted this summer to alleviate the immediate crisis. Operation Protection where police cells are used to house adult male prisoners and changes to the early release scheme SDS40releasing prisoners who have served 40% of their decisive sentence, as opposed to the usual 50% time limit. These solutions are reactive and do not address the underlying problems that determine prison numbers. The review of penalties should be proactive and identify measures that can address the overuse of prison as a form of punishment.

The review of sentencing is clear: custodial sentences (prison) will always be necessary to punish those convicted of serious crimes and to protect society against dangerous criminals. But building more prions will not reduce the prison population and ultimately relieve pressure on the system. Instead, the review will need to look more closely at sentencing and explore the role that alternative forms of punishment might play.

Sentence Severity

There’s something clear the relationship between the seriousness of the crime and the severity of the punishment: less serious crimes will result in less severe penalties; More serious crimes will result in harsher penalties. While it may be easier to rank crimes by severity, it may be more difficult to do so based on severity of punishment. When looking at the severity of the punishment, it is easy to determine that a 6-month prison sentence is more severe than a 3-month prison sentence due to the length of the person’s detention period. Similarly, when we look at non-custodial sentences such as a community order, we can determine which is more severe based on the length of time the sentence is served and the type of associated requirements such as a curfew and/or sentence. or unpaid work. When we compare different types of sentences, such as shorter prison sentences and non-custodial sentences, it becomes difficult to compare the severity of these sentences due to the different punitive elements added to these sentences.

My recently published research Journal of Quantitative Criminology It helps solve this measurement problem by creating sentence severity scale To measure and rank the different penalties available to courts in England and Wales. The research used real sentencing data to look at the relationship between different crimes and the resulting sentences. It also took into account a number of legal factors outlined in the sentencing guidelines and determined the sentence the judge would impose. The research produced a scale that scores different sentences, which are then ranked in order of seriousness. This resulted in the Sentence Severity Scale.

The Sentencing Severity Scale found that non-custodial penalties such as expulsions, fines, and other penalties predominate at the lower end of the severity scale, and, as predicted, longer prison sentences cluster at the higher end of the severity scale. But the research found that in the middle of the scale, community orders, suspended sentence orders and prison sentences of less than 12 months are all intertwined. This transition of disposal types can be seen in the diagram below.