Short prison sentences are widely used in England and Wales to punish repeat perpetrators of minor crimes. Yet, on almost every metric by which the criminal justice system should be measured, they fail
weeks Liam spent in prison after he rashly opened a can of beer in a shop and swigged from it cost him and the taxpayer vastly more than the £1.90 he had not paid for the drink. He stole it while he was beset by mental-health problems and a failing relationship. Prison made his troubled life worse. He re-emerged to find he had been kicked out of his flat, so had to move away from the relatives and friends on whom he relied for support.
Short sentences also fail because they make prisons more chaotic. Too many are overcrowded, violent places in which men get few chances to work, exercise or learn. Underfunding is one cause, but it is dwarfed by another: a vast increase in the size of the prison population. Although crime has broadly fallen since the 1990s the imposition of longer terms for serious crimes means the incarcerated population has doubled, from around 40,000 to 85,000 .
For prisoners themselves, short sentences achieve little beyond making unhappy lives worse. They protect the public from nuisance-makers while inmates are locked up, but without tackling any of the problems that cause their behaviour. “Prison screws up your life on the outside and if you send someone away for a few months that isn’t enough time to rehabilitate them,” says Chris Atkins, author of “Time after Time”, a book about repeat offenders.
The problem is that many magistrates, who do most of the sentencing for minor crimes, do not favour community sentences, the main alternative. Overseen by the probation service, the use of such sentences appears to have declined in recent years. Because the data are patchy the reasons for this are not entirely clear . It may be in part because the crimes that tend to lead to community sentences, such as theft, have decreased.
The most effective solutions come from thinking about health and welfare, as well as justice. Liam stopped offending after his fourth stint in prison, when he was referred to Liaison and Diversion, a service run by the National Health Service and the justice ministry. It identifies offenders with mental-health and drug-and-alcohol problems. It introduced him to someone who had escaped a long entanglement with the criminal justice system and gave him practical help, including with housing.
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