[Proteus]

Originally Posted by Toccata & Fugue

Unfortunately Prison doesn't really work in terms of reducing crime or protecting the public.

It rather obviously reduces crime and protects the public in the sense that there are at least some people currently in prison who would be committing crimes and harming the public if they weren't in prison. Or did you mean something else?

Originally Posted by Toccata & Fugue

Even more unfortunately as sentences are getting longer, people believe they are getting shorter.

Daily Mail readers probably do, yes, but most people probably just think they're short, rather than getting shorter (especially since we've had so much exposure to the much longer sentences handed out in the US).

Originally Posted by Toccata & Fugue

The media was hilarious this week. As they raged about over-lenient judges letting every criminal on the streets, they also pointed out how over-crowded the prisons were, often within the same paragraph.

That'll be because they think the amount of crime is going up. If you think crime is going up and you know the prison population is staying pretty much level (i.e. at full capacity), then it's a pretty sensible conclusion to assume that sentences are getting more lenient.

Originally Posted by Toccata & Fugue

Almost half of prisoners released re-offend.

[obvious]Then don't release them...[/obvious]

But seriously, I've seen this statistic hauled out so many times, but it's essentially meaningless, because there's never any point of comparison. A large number of people convicted of crimes reoffend, regardless of what punishment they're given, and if you assume that some sort of penalty must be imposed for crimes (I never know with you if this sort of assumption is dangerous, but 99.9% of the population would agree with me, so I'll go ahead anyway) the only sort of valid statistic would be one that compares reoffending rates across different punishments (fines, suspended sentences, community orders, etc.). And I've never seen any kind of remotely favourable statistics for community orders, which are supposedly the last step before prison.

On top of that, people tend to go to prison either for really serious crimes (that would normally indicate some sort of serious criminal mindset) or for repeated less serious offences, so it's natural that quite a lot of them reoffend - if you've got far enough through the criminal justice system that you end up in prison, you're often beyond saving. But that's not really the point - one of the purposes of prison is to scare the vast majority of people who would be terrified of going there, and the fact that some people aren't scared by it doesn't invalidate that purpose.

Originally Posted by Toccata & Fugue

As the prison system gets more crowded so it is less able to supply resources to rehabilitate people, thus creating a spiral of decline.

Then build more prisons and hire more staff to rehabilitate prisoners. (Obviously this would involve spending more money rather than attempting to solve the problem simply by passing more laws, which is why it's out of the question with the current Goverment.)

Originally Posted by Toccata & Fugue

Clearly increasing prison sentences as a deterrent and then watching the number of prisoners go up exponentially tells you a lot about the value of deterrents in the modern criminal justice system.

But part of the problem with that is that prison sentences as a deterrent work best when they go hand-in-hand with a high probability of being caught. As sentences get longer, the police are getting less and less effective and more and more overstretched (partly due to their seeming obsession with improving their image and catching people who sell peerages), and so whilst criminals know that if they get caught they'll do a long stretch they also know that they'll probably not get caught.

Originally Posted by Toccata & Fugue

The Government knows these things all too well but seems unable or unwilling to do something serious to address the issue.

The Government ignoring serious problems because they're too hard to fix? Surely not?