The Effectiveness of a Prison and Parole System. Daniel Glaser

Narratives of crime and punishment : a study of Scottish judicial culture

Over the past half-century, the number of adults under criminal justice supervision in­ creased precipitously in some Western countries, with carceral control in the United States reaching an unprecedented scale. While much of the scholarly attention has been focused on the development of mass incarceration, new research focuses on the parallel expansion of mass probation and, more broadly, mass supervision. In the United States, the number of adults on probation and parole supervision increased from one million in 1980 to a peak of nearly 5.1 million in 2007, more than double the number of inmates in local, state, and federal jails and prisons. Estimates from Europe in the late 2000s sug­ gest that there were approximately 3.5 million on community sanctions, compared to 2 million incarcerated. Individuals on these sanctions serve out their initial sentences (or remaining time after release from jail or prison) while residing in the community under the supervision of a probation or parole officer.

Supervision in the Community: Probation and Parole

The aims of retributive or non-utilitarian sentencing are said to conflict with parole. In this paper, we claim that a non-utilitarian approach to punishment does not necessarily contradict the parole. In particular, by adopting core elements of Duff’s framework of communicative sentencing, we argue that parole inherently holds a communicative meaning and can thus be reconciled with a non-utilitarian approach to punishment. In addition, we explore a way to enhance the communicative potential in the parole process and suggest that by recognizing and further incorporating the inherent communicative message in parole we can increase or maximize the board’s communicative potential. Finally, we discuss some benefits that can emerge from adopting a communicative sentencing framework to the parole process.

Retributive Whisper: Communicative Elements in Parole

A probation officer sits by his fax machine or telephone in the morning and receives information from the police about offenders who have been arrested the night before. He has to decide whom he will visit that day, have a talk with, probably write a report about and about whom he will advise the investigating judge or the courts on a sentence or an alternative to pre-trial detention. Who is it going to be? How is he going to decide? Another probation officer has a client fail to show up for supervision — not for the first time. When does she decide to start the breach procedure? What influences her decision? Who else is involved in the final decision? A judge or committee has to ponder whether to release an offender who has served half his sentence. What are the criteria that guide this person or body, and by which agencies and by whose advice are they influenced?

Decision-Making and Offender Supervision

This article seeks to explain the reasons for the sharp rise in prison recall rates in Scotland. It argues that recall practices need to be understood not as a technical corner of the justice system, but as part of a wider analysis of the politics of sentencing and release policy. While there are sound reasons for a policy of ‘early release’ (incentivizing good behavior and enabling the resettlement of prisoners), in practice early release has increasingly been used as a tool to try to limit the growth in the custodial population. Unable to control prison numbers through the ‘front door’ (judicial sentencing and bail/remand), successive governments have increasingly relied on early release as a surreptitious way of, in effect, re-sentencing prisoners. We argue that this political strategy is ultimately self-defeating, not least in feeding public cynicism about the penal system and community supervision in particular. This article reviews the changing legislative, policy and practice landscape of the regulation of non-compliance and recall practice, and draws on the desistance literature to illustrate how offender-supervisor relationships can be undermined by recall policies which threaten the legitimacy of both the supervisory relationship and the conditions of supervision orders.

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The Failure of Recall to Prison: Early Release, Front-Door and Back-Door Sentencing and the Revolving Prison Door in Scotland

This report presents the findings of an evaluation of the changes to disclosure and summary criminal legal assistance (SCLA)1 introduced under Summary Justice Reform (SJR). The overall aim of SJR is the establishment of a summary justice system which is: fair to the accused, victims and witnesses; effective in deterring and punishing offenders; efficient in the use of time and resources; and quick and simple in delivery.

Mary Munro

Papers

The Failure of Recall to Prison: Early Release, Front-Door and Back-Door Sentencing and the Revolving Prison Door in Scotland

Evaluation of the Reforms to Summary Criminal Legal Assistance and Disclosure