Everyone, it seems, wants longer prison sentences for criminals. Some people have thought it through; for many, though, it's just a kneejerk, intuitive reaction. So I'd like to start by looking at the five main reasons that you may want to send someone to jail. In no particular order they are: 1) Retribution; 2) Punishment; 3) Rehabilitation 4) Removal from society 5) Deterrence. Also important is the length of the sentence, which will depend on previous criminal record and the nature of the crime.
Retribution, or vengeance, is primitive. It amounts to the 21st century equivalent of An Eye For An Eye. Certainly, the victim should be considered before any sentence is imposed, and to that end Victim Impact Statements are a very good thing. But we have moved past this state of mind and it would be a shame to return to it. It is worth asking what is actually achieved by adopting this mindset. The criminal loses, but society gains nothing in return. It may satisfy the vindictive, embittered, small-minded members of society, but it satisfies only those people. It seeks (unsuccessfully) to find appropriate redress for the victim rather than appropriate punishment for the criminal. I think that it can be rejected.
Punishment seems the most obvious: a person has done something wrong, so we come up with an appropriate punishment. This is fine, if you accept that prison is always an appropriate punishment, though I'm not sure that it is. For many criminals, other punishments would fit the crime a lot better. In some cases a fine, a donation to a charitable organisation or time spent working for a particular community group would fit the crime better than jail, and plenty of creative punishments are possible. However, while punishing people for their misdeeds is intuitively correct, and there are worse forms of punishment than time in prison, like retribution it's hard to see what it achieves - nothing for society, and nothing for the criminal that isn't covered off in Deterrence below.
Jail time as punishment does stand up well to the notion of longer sentences for more severe crimes - if time in prison is a punishment, then more time in prison is a greater punishment - but less well to the notion of a person's previous record being taken into account. If two people commit equally severe crimes, and we are interested only in punishment, they will receive the same sentence. All in all, the general principle of jail for punishment does not stand up to close scrutiny.
Rehabilitation is a much more noble aim than retribution, though a number of assumptions are needed for it to work. The first is that the crime occurred as the result of some character flaw and not the environment in which the person lived or the person being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The second is that people are capable of changing for the better; the third is that prison is the place for the person's character flaw to be removed. If this assumption is correct then society will have one less bad person to worry about, right from the time of jailing onwards. Prisons take this on board and run re-education courses to try to help prisoners go straight, and give them skills to help on the outside, so at least rehabilitation is attempted.
Unfortunately, it doesn't often seem to work this way. Reoffending rates are very high for those released from prison. Further, there is an element of society that is destructive to everyone and everything that it meets. Such people are bad and always will be, and most of them are in prison at any given time. Putting those who are capable of reform in the same place doesn't seem to do the latters' chances any good. Even many of those who are not wholly destructive are not conducive to others' rehabilitation. Rehabilitation, like retribution, can be rejected as a good reason to send people to prison.
Removing the worse elements from circulation is very attractive, as it keeps those of us who are not criminals out of harm's way. It also keeps those who are simply destructive by nature inside - which is bad for prisoners but good for the rest of us, and I think that it's the rest of us who should have the highest priority. The was the claim made by someone within the New Zealand justice system a few years ago that some prisoners are so bad that they should never be released. in New Zealand, but nobody really followed up on it and it was soon forgotten. There needs to be a more public acknowledgement that such people do indeed exist. Every time they are released, it is only a short period of time before they reoffend, ruining the lives of all those unfortunate enough to cross their paths. It seems to me that imprisoning people just to keep them out of the way of the rest of us is justified.
The people in the justice system who make the decisions recognise who these people are and do their best to keep them off the streets for as long as possible. But there is only so much that you can do within the current legal frameworks. Judges are limited in the sentence that they can pass down for any given crime; parole boards cannot keep prisoners in prison beyond what that sentence. So people are released back into society when everyone knows that they will steal, kill vandalise and assault until they are caught - normally not long after release.
The fifth point deterrence, relates to both the person in question and society in general. In some ways it is of limited value in some ways, because it's unlikely that anyone would be deterred from robbing a bank, for example, because he knew of a severe penalty handed down to somebody else who had done the same. The value of sentencing some people to deter others does hold up, though, because it maintains society's knowledge that people who do bad things go to jail, for periods of time commensurate with their crime. Indeed, people going to jail are just part of the wallpaper to our daily lives, nobody really thinks anything of it. Everyone is therefore aware that some people who commit crimes go to jail, often for very long periods of time. But there are no news reports of people getting away with crime (though few would doubt that plenty of people do). In any event, we want fewer people committing crimes, and knowing that they may go down if they do is only a positive. This reason seems to stand up to scrutiny.
So the plausible reasons for sending somebody to prison are removal from and deterrence. In a future article I will have a look at what the implications are, and what an appropriate sentencing structure might be.