How bad are short custodial sentences?

Civitas, 24 August 2010

It is an article of faith amongst some prison reformers that the use of short prison sentences increases the chance of re-offending, sometimes turning a one-time offender towards a life of crime. They are counter-productive in terms of fighting crime, they argue. According to the most recent systematic evidence, this is probably not the case.

Martin Killias and Patrice Villetaz performed a systematic review of empirical studies into the comparative effects of short custodial sentences with non-custodial alternatives for the Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Group. It was published in 2008. They found: ‘custodial and non-custodial sanctioned do not differ very much much in their effects on re-offending… claims about damaging effects of short-term confinement may have been overstated’. They suggest that this gives policy makers more options. If it turns out to be cheaper to use a community sentence, then it can do just as much to tackle re-offending as custody. On the other hand, if a custodial sentence fits the seriousness of the crime, it is unlikely that a brief period of incarceration will put the offender at greater risk of recidivism.

In the UK, offenders on short sentences are amongst those most likely to re-offend. There are two ways of thinking about this. One is that custody clearly didn’t work and these offenders should not have been sentenced to prison at all. Another is that custody was working (in that it was stopping re-offending during the sentence) and, in fact, it might have been appropriate to keep the offender in prison for longer. What this systematic review suggests is that alternatives to custody are not (yet) predictably superior at tackling long-term re-offending. This means that when it is worthwhile to incarcerate an individual (both as a fitting punishment and to incapacitate them temporarily), there isn’t much of a trade-off in terms of increased re-offending later down the line.

Short custodial sentences have very limited powers to rehabilitate. But the alternatives are not much better for the moment.