Alternative Methods to Prison Sentencing in Britain Essay -- Papers

More and more(prenominal) people in Britain ar being clock timed to jail time this is a fact. In 2004, there atomic number 18 currently over eighty thousand inmates.1 (Peter Reydt, 2004 / Scottish Executive, 2003) Crime is on the increase but our prisons are already overcrowded. Consequently, new prisons will be required to accommodate captives. Where will the money come from to pay for the wind of new prisons? Will they declare a sufficient rehabilitation programs in place? The prison dodging is obviously failing because it is not playacting as a deterrent. Clearly we should now be examining wherefore the system is failing and possible alternatives to prison. What should these alternatives be? Would they work and would they be seen as a suitable punishment? First of every, Id like to look at why the prison service is failing. Ten years ago, Britains prison population was genuinely on the decline (Casciani, 2002)2. This was due to the politi cal sympathies at the time implementing more community based punishments over the use of prison sen 10cing. However, not all of the Home Secretaries of the time - Kenneth Baker and Kenneth Clarke - agreed with this policy and soon changed their minds and began to get up on the rhetoric of being tough on crime3(Cascianni, 2002) by asking the courts to sentence more people to prison. Due to these sterner policies being put in place, the government figures in 1999 actually showed that there were now more than twenty quaternary thousand people being sent to prison than there were ten years previous.(Cascianni, 2002)4 This was despite no change in the amount of adults being convicted of offenses. The governments 2001 Halliday ... ...m the best way forward. If one life - even that of a prisoner - can be saved, then this must surely be a very good idea? If these alternatives were in place they would help the overcrowding in jails and the building of more jail s - which cost on average sixty million pounds each to build.(Rethinking Crime and Punishment, 2002)12. This would be less of a burden on the taxpayer and this money could go into developing these alternatives and having them implemented instead of prison. If the offender is shown to be fully rehabilitated and to want to give something back to society, this can only be beneficial not only to the offender to but to society as a whole. There are some duties we owe even to those who have wronged us. There is, after all, a limit to retribution and punishment. Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)13