The rising use of imprisonment: the impact of 'decarceration' policies

TLDR: In this article, the authors examine the place of imprisonment in today's penal system in England and Wales, and conclude that the innovations of the decarceration are This paper represents the first part of a research project aimed at understanding contemporary patterns of imprisonment and evaluating the places of imprisonment, and it is particularly urgent in view of the prominence of 'law and order' issues in British politics.

Abstract: The publications of Andrew Scudl’s research on ’decarceration’ promoted a widespread debate on the impact and desirability of community based treatment policies. In this paper, however, we shall query the extent of the within the penal system, but that the very opposite happened in practice. The paper concludes that the innovations of the decarceration are This paper represents the first part of a research project aimed at understanding contemporary patterns of imprisonment and evaluating the place of imprisonment in today’s penal system in England and Wales. Such a task is particularly urgent in view of the prominence of ’law and order’ issues in British politics. Amongst the most important of these are: (1) calls by the Tory law and order lobby and the popular press for long prison sentences ‘life to mean life, or at least twenty years’ for certain categories of offenders; (2) the removal of the chance of parole for some prisoners; (3) the introduction of more varied custodial sentencing options for young offenders in the 1982 Criminal Justice Act; (4) the expansion in the prison building programme under which 14 new prisons are to be built. These various factors indicate the much harsher moral-political climate facing offenders. If the persistence of imprisonment as a dominant form of punishment, at a time when professional and legislative opinion appeared to be in favour of reducing the institutional treatment of deviant populations to a minimum, is not adequately understood, then those of us committed to the desirability of restricting and ultimately abolishing prisons and other custodial institutions are likely to have little success. The starting-point for monitoring and hopefully restraining the use of custody in what seems to be an era of renewed belief in incarceration, is thus an examination of the use of imprisonment and allied forms of coercive detention in the so-called ’decarceration’ era.