This is a guest post by Dr Stephanie Wallace of Lancaster University.
Last month the Government launched an Independent Sentencing Review to re-evaluate sentencing and particularly look at the use of non-custodial alternatives. This comes at a crucial time given the growing pressures facing the prison system. This summer our prison population reached close to 90,000 across the England and Wales estate. That is almost 10,000 more prisoners than the prison service deem acceptable, and results in prisons across the country such as at HMP Durham and HMP Leeds operating at around 170% capacity.
Inadequate regimes
Prison overcrowding mixed with workforce shortages has left some prisons unable to adequately provide access to purposeful activity in terms of education, work or training. Activities that are imperative for rehabilitation and preparation for life outside of prison. HM Chief Inspectorate of Prisons have stated that prisons are also becoming increasing volatile and are failing to prepare prisoners for their return to the community which has far reaching consequences for society.
Short term solutions
A number of short-term solutions were enacted this summer to alleviate the immediate crisis, including Operation Safeguard where police cells have been used to house adult male prisoners, and changes in the early release scheme SDS40, releasing prisoners that have serving 40% of their determinant sentences, as opposed to the usual 50% time point. These solutions are reactive and do not address the fundamental issues driving the prison numbers. A review into sentencing must be proactive and identify measures which can address the overuse of prison as a form of punishment.
The review into sentencing is clear: custodial sentences (prison) will always be required to punish those convicted of serious crimes, and to protect society against dangerous offenders. However, building more prions will not reduce the prison population and will ultimately, not relieve the pressures on the system. Instead, the review will need to look more closely at sentencing, and explore the role that alternative forms of punishment can take.
Sentence Severity
There is an obvious relationship between crime seriousness and sentence severity: less serious crimes will result in less severe sentences; more serious crimes will result in more severe sentences. While it is easier to rank crimes in terms in their seriousness, it can be more difficult to do this with sentence severity. When we consider the severity of a sentence, it is straightforward to identify that a custodial sentence of 6 months is more severe than a custodial sentence of 3 months, due to the length of time the individual will be incarcerated. Similarly, if we look at a non-custodial sentences, like a community order, we can identify which is more severe by the length of time the sentence is served, as well as type of requirements attached to it, such as a curfew and/or unpaid work. When we compare different types of disposals, such as those shorter custodial sentences and non-custodial sentences, the ability to compare the severity of these sentences becomes more difficult due to the different punitive elements attached to these sentences.
My research recently published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology helps to resolve this measurement problem by creating a sentence severity scale to measure and rank the different sentences available to the courts in England and Wales. The research used real sentencing data, to look at the relationship between different crimes and their resulting sentences. It also took into consideration a number of legal factors that are stipulated in the sentencing guidelines, and determine the sentence given by the judge. The research produced a scale which scored the different sentences and enabled these sentences to then be ranked in order of their severity. This resulted in the Sentence Severity Scale.
The Sentence Severity Scale found that non-custodial sentences such as discharges, fines and other sentences dominated at the lower end of the severity scale, and as anticipated, longer custodial sentences congregated at the highest end of the severity scale. However, in the middle of the scale, the research found that community orders, suspended sentence orders and shorter custodial sentences of less than 12 months, all interweaved. This crossover of disposal types can be seen in the diagram below.
The scale
From this scale then, it is possible to identify alternative non-custodial sentencing options which are comparative in severity to those short-term custodial sentences. This indicates that in place of short-custodial sentences, there are plausible options which could be used in exchange for a custodial sentence.
Better use of the alternative sentencing options would allow the prison service to restabilise. It would allow prisons to provide the adequate care required to operate safely and undertake its rehabilitative function for those that require it most. For those receiving the alternative non-custodial options, the evidence already demonstrates lower reoffending rates. Therefore, making better use of the full range of sentences available to the courts can better serve the prison system and society in the long run.
