(Wordnet, 2003)
Custody has long been the accepted norm when punishing criminals, whether it was in the form of village stocks or pillories or dark, dank castle basements, custody has always been a way of taking away ones liberty. It was a fear of lost liberty that we felt drove crime down; that and the appalling conditions in prisons. However, for a certain growing element of society it is seen more as a right of passage, a way to gain respect from ones peers rather than a punishment.
Take the story of Paul Rosendale, 34 from Basildon, Essex. In his interview with the Observer newspaper in April, 2003, he says that, “It wasn’t scary, it wasn’t a deterrent; it was just boring”. His attitude was that prison was a place where his friends were, a place where you have no responsibilities and everything is done for you. For men and women like him there must be a better option for punishment and rehabilitation, a better deterrent. If we as society want retribution and reform then we may feel let down by Pauls’ attitude towards the custodial sentence and will need to look towards other ways of punishment that serve to deal with the offender in a way that will both make us happy justice has been done and prevent the criminal from re-offending. We may then turn to alternative methods of punishment such as community sentencing.
There are six types of community sentence;
- Community rehabilitation order
- Community punishment order
- Community Punishment and Rehabilitation Order
- Curfew order
- Attendance centre order
- Supervision order
These are given out by sentencers for varying degrees of crime i.e. community rehabilitation order (community service) may be given instead of a prison sentence but failure to attend will mean a spell in prison is inevitable. All of the above are not exclusive and can be, and are, used in conjunction with custodial sentences.
Amongst the many alternative punishment options in use is an American style rehabilitation session. Instead of receiving a custodial sentence for a relatively minor offence, the offender has to attend a three monthly course of counselling sessions known as ‘Cognitive Behaviour’ programmes. Here they are told to “bare their souls and address their criminal behaviour” (Observer, 2003). The Canadian and American schemes have shown to be relatively successful, showing a dramatic drop in the re-offending rate after thirty to sixty sessions. However results in Britain have not proved to be so encouraging. Staff running the therapy sessions have found that there is a lot of hostility towards the scheme, with a third of attendees failing to show up after the first two hour personality test and a further third dropping out after the first few sessions. Reasons for this may be that the people that are sent there are of the wrong type for the course. Many are addicts or people in crisis who just forget or can not find the motivation to go. One solution to this would be to employ a security firm or public appointed group to ensure that offenders turn up and stay for the duration of the course.
However by employing guards to look after, cajole and force offenders into complying with community sentence orders, we are incurring both extra cost and imposing a custodial feel to what was meant to be a non-custodial punishment. Does this extra cost incurred match or come close to the cost of a gaol sentence? And does the purpose of a community sentence, i.e. reform and reintegration into society without the stigma or malaise that is associated with custodial sentencing, become lost once custodial restrictions are imposed?
In closing it is my belief that there are merits for both types of sentence, dependant on effectiveness in each specific case. What is good for the goose is not necessarily as good for the gander and what may work in one situation may not be as effective, or even work at all, in another. Sentencing has, is and always will be defined by society’s needs and wants at the time, and the justification of specific sentencing will be based on the perceived effectiveness it holds. Also the two types of sentence, custodial and community, are not mutually exclusive and do converge to provide a positively balanced form of punishment.
