At last a Government following peer reviewed criminological research that short jail sentences do not work, and in fact may increase recidivism.
Do we think other jurisdictions might follow this outbreak of common sense?
If they’re in jail, they can’t very well commit more crimes but that’s rather obvious. Glad the money spent researching this was well spent.
Where do you propose we put 'em all?
Or do we reduce the number of offenses that call for jail time?
ETA: Some reason you couldn’t be bothered to link to the study?
Here’s an article. It doesn’t say anything about a study.
The first result of “belgium short jail sentences study” on Google is this thread.
All that aside, I’m not crazy about the idea. For young or first-time offenders, I have no issue with alternatives to a jail or prison sentence, but abolishing a (say) six-month sentence for (say) a third-time convicted shoplifter seems to me a bad idea.
From that article, which I was going to post but Frank beat me to it:
Without knowing what the alternative is, its hard to say if this is good or bad. However, this could be the Rosa Parks moment for petty crooks…
Having studied this, they may be on to something. While I have seen a overnite stay in jail to be a sobering experience, a few months or so does nothing more, other than force that person to join a gang.
Makes sense to me. I could support jail time under a year being replaced with a fine, probation, or some other punishment. Depending on the person, there are far better ways to punish, deter or otherwise rehabilitate criminals.
When they’re in jail, they are wards of the state with no income, burdening taxpayers. On probation, serving the community or paying a fine, they can still continue their legitimate life, earning money and maintaining professional and personal contacts. Once you’re in jail, you’ve lost most of your job prospects forever, and many friends will reconsider vouching for you or referring you, and may even try and avoid you. After a jail sentence, the main friends you have left are other criminals and the main prospect you have to earn income is more crime.
Low level offenders in this area not infrequently get 10, 20 or 30 day sentences. It could cost them a job, or set them back in school. I think it takes the fear of jail away from them too. They realize it’s pretty safe, and mostly just boring. If someone isn’t a real danger to society, I would support alternatives to short jail sentences.
You make some excellent points.
Personally I would be in favor of corporal punishment for low-level offenders instead of prison. But I don’t think that’s on the horizon (and would possibly be found unconstitutional as C&U).
There was just a study done here in the US in the last year or two that showed the exact opposite (shorter prison stays have lower recidivism rates). It was only looking at parole violations, but it was at least evidence based. I would love to see the study done by the Belgians…
http://www.apaintl.org/resources/documents/ProjectSUCCESSShort-termInterventionsforSuccessforTechnicalParoleViolators.pdf
http://www.regblog.org/2014/08/27/27-kenney-shorter-sentences-for-parole-violators/
So you give the offender an alternative sentence of a fine or community service: what you do when he doesn’t complete the sentence? I don’t see the alternative to jail here.
If very short sentences aren’t dissuading offenders, common sense = longer jail sentences.
I don’t think this is a 1 to 1 comparison. In the US, they are saying that shorter prison sentences have a lower recidivism rate than long prison sentences. The Belgians are claiming that no prison sentence has a lower recidivism rate than a short prison sentence.
Furthermore, this US study seems to be taking people who are already going to jail for a long sentence and shortening that sentence. This program is only open to a subset of criminals who committed some relatively harmless crimes. Giving violent offenders shorter sentences may have a completely different effect.
If in Belgium they are taking people who got convicted of a minor crime, got sentenced to a short sentence, and instead make them do some kind of service or meet parole conditions, then that’s quite different. For one, the criminals in question are extremely likely to be people who did something stupid and relatively minor, the kind of people who are quite unlikely to re-offend. However, by taking these low-risk individuals and sending them to jail, thereby likely destroying their careers, reputation, or family relationships, the government could very well increase the rate of recidivism.
You’re operating on the oversimplification that criminals are deterred linearly by heavier consequences, which is actually the subject of contentious debate. Common sense rarely reflects economic reality, unfortunately. This is also an argument which is heavily colored by political beliefs, so it’s hard to say anything for sure, especially when the results of social science are so heavily affected by the frame with which you view statistics.
One thought: If you’re going to commit a crime, are you going to look up how long you’re going to jail for before you do it? I suspect most criminals don’t. This idea that criminals are not actively calculating cost-benefit is supported by Lee & McCrary, who found that those just over 18 and those just under 18 were arrested at similar rates, despite a huge increase in the likelihood of going to jail once one is older than 18.
Common sense often fails on complex questions. Despite its hammer and nail appearance , crime and punishment is complex.
Or develop some weird habits due to confinement and boredom.
Good for the Belge.
I think all our confinement sentences are at least questionable. I suspect that all of them (outside of short-term psychiatric holds) are too long. Too many times, it seems like we want to be like that lady in one of Sam Clemens’s books who threw someone in a dungeon for decades (because he called her hair “red”).
We need to stop acting like four years is a short time in a box, and only multi-decades sentences are long enough to be intimidating. Years in a cage is not rehabilitative in all cases, and we are running out of room in the cages.
But this ten becomes unaffordable. If carried on for long enough in a short sighted system, the country might end up with one in every five prisoners in the whole world.
Oh, wait a minute, that IS what has happened in the US.
In future years people will look back on our use of imprisonment in the same way we look at other failed systems of punishment.
Even if the claim in the OP were true, one thing that seems to be ignored is that one effect of doing away with short jail sentences is that you remove the threat of a jail sentence for certain offenses. And it is my guess that it’s a pretty powerful motivator.
I was peripherally involved with a case where the defendant, found guilty, was offered an alternative sentence that involved direct interaction with the injured party. The injured party stood up in court and said, “Fuck that. I don’t want him around”.
What sort of alternative sentences are being suggested and how is the monitoring of the program achieved?
“Common sense” decades ago argued that intensive policing and arresting and prosecuting people for “nuisance” crimes would be ineffective and a waste of resources.
Now we have violent crime at a 40-year low. Reasons for that also include locking up more offenders.
Costly but effective.