Risk And Dangerousness Notes

Sentencing and Punishment: The Quest for Justice: ‘Risk and Danger’ Easton, S. and Piper, C. (2012)

• Permanent removal of offenders from public life - this is not just deserts, but management of risk by confining offender to within the walls of the prison. Indeterminate sentences require evidence of rehabilitation before release.

• Even if there is no prospect of reform at lease the offenders can be contained. Prison becomes WAREHOUSING, a kind of storage of offenders.

• Garland’s “culture of control” - based on idea of selective incapacitation, where some offenders are given custodial sentences which could not be justified on retributivist grounds. Distinction between:

  • Criminologies of “everyday life” - sees criminals as normal human beings, can be deterred using pragmatic techniques. Reduction by reducing opportunities for crime, for example focusing on security weaknesses and other means of situational crime prevention.

  • Criminologies of “the other” - focuses on values, seeks to assert moral standards. The normality of crime is not ok and needs to be combatted. Certain criminals are not in fact, normal, but rather wicked and evil! They are inherently dangerous and “other”. Deal with using indeterminate custodial sentences or community exclusion order.

• Rivera Beiras - noted the increase in punitive management of poverty and the criminalization of dissenters. Shift towards an exclusion based approach. This represents the view that if the individual is responsible for crime then it is pointless to search for the underlying causes of crime. States with larger minority populations such as the US tend to have higher incarceration rates.

• There is a trend towards a more economic approach to punishment, demonstrated by having aims categorised as “effective”, “value for money” and “meeting performance targets”. MANAGERIALISM. Multi-purpose techniques saturating criminal justice with measured performance strategies. Old language of social causation has been replaced with words including “risk factors”, “crime costing” etc, bringing economic forms of calculation into criminological field. (Garland)

Notions of risk

• Just deserts sentencing should not be looking at risk because it looks at the past rather than the future. Focuses on the seriousness only of the offences already committed.

• The Risk Society

  • Apparent increasing preoccupation with risk in economic, personal and political realms. Management of insecurity (at end of 20th C). Society increasingly worried about the future. Idea is to reduce social anxiety.

  • Attempts to manage crime and risk of crime are not confined to sentencing. CJS is only one part of government’s crime reduction strategy. Sentencing is of huge political importance, but its importance is of decreasing importance. A lot of crime is not reported, so a system of new initiatives has been introduced, we now have a new and different infrastructure. More of a focus on community partnerships, empowering communities with crime-prevention techniques. Emphasis on cost-effectiveness, may cut across justice.

  • Garland says that we have grown used to crime, and accepted harsh punishments and punitive segregation. Justified the development of means of exclusion in order to control dangerous offenders.

• Pratt’s “new culture of intolerance”.

  • Moving away from civilizing punishment, encouraging harsher penal policies. Focus on the seriousness of the crime.

  • FOCUS ON THE DANGEROUS OFFENDER. Categories of who is dangerous has changed over time. The categorization of “dangerous” offenders is now used in CJA 2003.

  • But calling certain criminals “dangerous” in not actually a new thing. Stems from 19th C, part of State’s protective measures against unemployment and poverty... The dangerous are people who present social dangers. But it is not always clear what we mean when we say that someone is “dangerous”. Different constructions have been developed by different groups over time.

  • Floud Committee - dangerous is not objective. Said angers are unacceptable risks.

Incapacitation And Public Protection

• The utilitarian justification.

• In the UK and US, incapacitation has a strong presence in the field of penal policy. This is a utilitarian approach because the aim is to maximise happiness on society, and this can be done by removing dangerous offenders. Not inherently incompatible with incompatible with the rationales behind rehabilitation, because incapacitation can be combined with rehabilitation strategies.

• In utilitarian terms, society should be protected for as long as possible from dangerous offenders. The most effective form of incapacitation is the death penalty, however in abolitionist jurisdictions imprisonment is the favoured method.

• But this does not solve the long-term problems of crime.

  • There still exists the risk of prisoners escaping

  • Opportunities to commit crimes in prison

  • Offending may continue on release

• Using prisons as warehouses for offenders is not a cost-effective strategy, and for some crimes it may mean that other offenders will move into the incarcerated offender’s territory.

• Does incarceration even work?

  • May ultimately lead to higher offending rates

  • Dehumanising of offenders in prison

  • Opportunities to learn from other offenders

• Coalition government is looking to cut the number of people in prisons because of the financial burden. The reductions in crime from the use of custody are fairly minimal; punishment is only one factor in criminality. Incapacitation is an extremely expensive option for the reductions that it yields.

• Is it better to invest resources in policing rather than punishment?

• In recent years, because of the drain on pubic resources, there has been a tendency to reserve prison for those who are most likely to reoffend.

Selective and categorical incapacitation

Distinguish between the different forms of incapacitation. Both are forms of predictive sentencing. Who should shoulder the risk of harm? The potential future victim or the offender by...

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