CRISIS Flashcards
(Caradino, Dignan and Mair, 2013: 36) note that:
‘England has more prisoners proportionate to is population than any other country in Western Europe’
(Ministry of Justice, 2012) stated that:
48% of adults that are released from prison in the UK, reoffend within a year.
(Bromley Briefings Prison Factfile, 2017)p
notes that Julian Le Vay concluded that the cost of solving overcrowding by building more prisons in the UK would be £3.7 billion not including a an annual running cost of £1.5 billion, however even by 2022/23 the ministry of justice’s funding will be only £463m.
They further state that they don’t expect any improvements to overcrowding before 2022
(Bromley Briefings Prison Factifle, 2017: 9
‘Overcrowding cripples the prison systems ability to provide a decent and constructive public service. This is not just because 21,000 people still share cells, for up to 23 hours a day. It is also because every day people are bussed around the country to extraordinarily remote locations just to make sure that every last bed space is filled.’
(Cavadino and Dignan, 2014: 10)
‘We may be at a critical juncture, much as a seriously ill person may reach a ‘turning point at which a patient either begins to improve or fall into a fatal decline’. In other words, either the present situation could be used as an opportunity to reform the system into something more rational and humane, or else it will deteriorate into something much worse even than the present.’
Commission on English Prisons Today, 2017: 5) found there to be a crisis stating that:
“All signs point to a current crisis in the English criminal justice system. Prison numbers are at an all time high, courts are over-subscribed, the police overstretched and the public unconfident in either the efficacy or justice of the penal system. Re offending rates remain high, with 2/3rds of prisoners re-offending within two years of release, a figure that goes up to 74.8% for men aged between 18-21.
(Scott and Flynn, 2014) argue that prison population has increased primarily because:
Of longer prison sentences and the increased use of determinate, indeterminate and mandatory life sentences.
Assortment - Conferencing as a RJ method of reducing offending.
(Robinson and Shapland, 2008) evaluated the effectiveness of 840 conferences across 3 restorative ‘conferencing’ schemes, under the auspices of the Home Office Crime reduction programme where the offender sat down with their families and the victim of their crime. Whether It be through shame, outlined by reintegrative shaming theory (RST) (Braithwaite, 1999) or through empathy or understanding (Maxwell and Morris, 2002), due to the inherently less stigmatic format of dealing with people to which the offender has closer ties with than a judge or magistrate (Braithwaite, 1989) the conferencing was highly effective, with 98% of conferences leading to a written agreement signed by all present outlining concrete steps the offender and victim could take. Although restorative justice is seen primarily as a victim oriented response to crime, 4/5ths of the interviews became focused on the offender (Robinson and Shapland, 2008) with 72% of victims saying it was very or quite important to them to help the offender reform (Shapland, 2006) opting for this as reparation for the crime over financial reparation. Conferencing also allows for the creation of social capital - relationship that can lead to useful resources including jobs (Farrall 2002) and 56% of offenders closure had been given for their crime, 17% saying it had to an extent. (Robison and Shapland) due to the serious success outlined it should be seen as a serious possibility of reducing prison numbers in an attempt to assist this symptom of the prison crisis. Yeah
