Book Review: Alternatives to prison: Options for an insecure society

Punishment in Society: The Improbable Persistence of Probation and Other Community Sanctions and Measures

“…The 'intermediate sanctions' movement in the USA, which saw the emergence in the 1980s and 90s of community service, intensive supervision, house arrest, day reporting centres and boot camps is an example of this (Tonry & Lynch 1996) as is the imposition of fees on probationers and parolees to pay for their own supervision (Diller, Greene & Jacobs, 2009). Another example is the tendency toward the 'creative mixing' of multiple conditions or requirements as part of a single sanction, as has been observed in England and Wales (Bottoms et al 2004). Indeed, in England & Wales a plethora of separate community sanctions has recently been 'streamlined' into a single generic 'community order', which enables sentencers to select any combination of conditions from a 'menu' of twelve different requirements and restrictions (Mair, Cross and Taylor 2007).…”

“…Indeed, where the use of CSM has increased, this has almost always tended to be at the expense of lower-tariff penalties such as fines and discharges, leading to what Cohen (1985) has referred to as 'net widening' and 'mesh thinning.' That is, CSM frequently brings greater numbers of less serious offenders into the penal net than might otherwise have been the case, and imposes upon them more rather than less severe sanctions (Bottoms et al 2004).…”

The Thrill of the Chase: Punishment, Hostility and the Prison Crisis

“…Indeed, there is ample evidence that, besides not solving the problem of crime, in many ways, the prison may perpetuate it instead (Sampson and Laub, 2003). In light of these issues, it is perplexing that so little attention is given to other, more reintegrative, alternatives to incarceration (Bottoms et al, 2004). …”

How not to assess probation performance: Constructing local reconviction rates

“…Despite the considerable conceptual differences in how incapacitation and deterrence are expected to operate, reviews tend to conclude that their effects are not distinguishable from one another (Nagin, 1998;von Hirsch et al, 1999;Carter, 2003;Bottoms, 2004). Another common conclusion is that while increasing the use of imprisonment might lead to some additional incapacitative effect or marginal deterrence, increasing the risk of being caught is a more effective way of securing crime reduction (von Hirsch et al, 1999).…”