On restorative justice vs. punitive justice, some thoughts:
Let’s get one thing out of the way at the very start of this: prisons don’t work. According to the government’s own statistics[1], approximately 50% of all adult prisoners reoffend within one year of release from prison. For adults serving a custodial sentence of less than 12 months, that figure is more than 60%. The real number of people who commit further offences having been released from prison must logically be even higher than that, because these numbers only include those who reoffend in the first year ‘out’.
Prison is not, then, an effective deterrent even for those with first-hand experience. Nor, evidently, is the current prison system providing effective rehabilitation. If either of those facts were the case, the statistics quoted above would be very different indeed.
It is, undoubtedly, the case that if someone is serving a custodial sentence, they cannot commit further offences ‘on the outside’. However, given that the average cost of a prison place is more than £30,000 per year[2] (and in some prisons much more than that[3]), it’s only right to consider whether there are more effective alternatives.
It’s also worth pointing out that conditions in UK prisons are all too often inhumane and degrading, not to mention unsafe. This isn’t my view – though I have no reason to disagree with it – rather it is the view of a Dutch court[4] which, earlier this year, refused to extradite a suspected drug dealer to face charges in the UK, because to do so would have put him, “at real risk of inhuman or degrading treatment.”
Just about the only virtue of the prison system, then, is to satisfy society’s instinctive lust for vengeance. The awkward facts that it is expensive, actively harmful, and ineffective at reducing reoffending, are widely ignored since they don’t fit with our primal urge to see bad things happen to people who break the law.
It is unfortunate that, for a wide variety of political, educational, and other reasons, the UK public is averse to considering evidence-based solutions to societal problems. Aside from the inherent difficulty that we all experience in setting aside our emotional reaction to incidents such as the topic of this thread; as humans we often perceive such solutions as unfair. Our gut feeling is that two people who commit the same crime should receive the same sentence – you need only look at this forum for evidence of that. Reality, though, tells us that real life is not that simple. The most serious offenders are often those least likely to reoffend, whilst those who commit petty crimes live lives of seemingly incessant recidivism[5].
There is no shortage of evidence that evidence-based justice, and rehabilitation, in the community is more effective at reducing reoffending than prison. For example, a study in Sussex[6] found that restorative justice lowered reoffending rates by 30%, at the same time saving hundreds of thousands of pounds from the prison budget, while intensive, cognitive-skills based probation work is proven to reduce reoffending rates by 6% - 10%[7].
All of these effective interventions have one thing in common: they seek to address the root cause of the offending by working with the offender to effect positive changes in their lives. For some, that will mean accessing mental health treatment. For others it may mean taking part in one of the many effective, evidence based, accredited offender behaviour programmes[8]. Whatever form these targeted interventions take, the idea is to prevent the offender committing any more offences because that – and only that – is the way to prevent anyone else having to become a victim.
Of course, no intervention is ever 100% effective. There will always be a small number of offenders who, for reasons of public safety, it is necessary to confine. For some, this confinement will be prison-based, for others secure hospitals, etc. I would contend, however, that the fact that the UK currently sends more people to prison than any other European country[9] other than Russia and Turkey – and yet also has persistently higher crime rates[10] – should be telling us that change is badly needed.