Blog: Stop Press! “More jail time not a deterrent”

Well, that’s not a headline you read every day, especially not in the Daily Telegraph. But there it was, looking at me over the cornflakes. A completely objective article in a right-wing broadsheet reporting that longer prison sentences don’t deter.

Supporters of the Prison Reform Trust may not take much convincing that ever longer prison sentences (average sentences up from under three years to nearly five since 2008) have been a serious mistake. But repeated polls show that much of the general public takes a different view. People understandably conclude that sentencing must be too lenient when they are bombarded with stories about crime on a daily basis.

That’s one of the reasons why reliable independent research about the actual impact of punishments matters. If we are going to use the most extreme sanction allowed under law—imprisonment—we should be confident that it’s doing what we want it to. It’s very much to the credit of the Sentencing Council that it commissioned The Effectiveness of Sentencing Options on Reoffending published in September this year, seeking to fulfil its statutory duty to “have regard to the effectiveness of sentences in preventing reoffending.”

It’s not surprising that people think deterrence works. For lots of us in lots of situations it does. Most people slow down when they see a speed camera. But of course, the deterrence there comes from the likelihood of getting caught, not the penalty that follows. If there are no cameras, speeds pick up.

That’s one of the key findings of the research which prompted the Daily Telegraph article. Deterrence, if it features at all, comes from the certainty of detection, not the harshness of punishment. In many situations, people committing crime are not thinking ahead at all, but when they are it’s more likely to be about whether they will get caught than about what the punishment might be.

The research draws on a wide range of studies and is properly cautious about the conclusions that it is safe to draw on “effectiveness”. It also recognises that sentencing can have several purposes—reducing reoffending being only one of them. Perhaps its most confident finding, drawn from multiple studies, is that short prison sentences appear to undermine rather than support rehabilitation. Anyone who has ever spent an evening in a local prison reception area, watching the staff greet their “regular customers”, knows that short prison sentences certainly don’t deter.

We are not being stupid or unkind when we cling to the belief that the threat of harsh punishment delivers more than it really does. Most of us have experienced a “don’t do that or else” form of discipline, either on the receiving end as a child or trying it out as a parent. There’s everything to be said for connecting bad behaviour to a consequence. What doesn’t make sense is expecting the threat of that consequence to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to changing behaviour the next time around. It makes even less sense to ratchet up the severity of consequence when the technique has already failed one or more times before.

While it can be pretty confident about what doesn’t work, the research commissioned by the Sentencing Council doesn’t pretend that the evidence neatly points to sentences that are always effective. The best evidence on that issue has to take on board studies of how and why people change, and what tends to lie behind offending in the first place. But the report does tentatively conclude that sentences that take account of the particular characteristics of the offender are more likely to have a rehabilitative effect. It also suggests that the content of a sentence—rather than its length—can sometimes do the same. Those findings suggest that we would do better to invest in securing good information about someone before they are sentenced, and make far better use of their time in prison if that is really the only appropriate punishment for what they’ve done.

In a report earlier this year, Bishop James Jones, best known for chairing the inquiry into the Hillsborough stadium disaster, called for a fundamental reassessment of the policy and practice of sentencing. Anyone who reads his report or bothers to read the research highlighted by the Daily Telegraph is likely to reach the same conclusion. The way we use prison in particular makes no sense. We think longer sentences deter when they don’t, and we allow the content of those ever longer periods in custody to be devoid of meaning or purpose.

The Justice Select Committee of the House of Commons is also currently looking at public understanding of sentencing. This Sentencing Council document should be a key report for the committee to bear in mind. If the public is frustrated by what our sentencing law delivers, it might just be because we’ve created a false expectation, rather than because the law hasn’t been properly explained.

It’s good that the debate is starting to happen, and high time it moved on from stale political posturing on whether sentencing is either “tough” or “soft”. It’s not something I would have expected to hear myself say, but reading an article in the Telegraph might be a good place for our politicians to start.

Peter Dawson
Director