How the Modern Prison System Has Developed

Community sentence is regarded as a powerful method for keeping many offenders out of walls and bars of prison. Community sentence in this Act has many forms as they are described in s147 of the Act. At the same time the community order is subject to many restrictions as it is not automatically imposing on every offender. These restrictions are defined in s148 of (CJA 2003)

According to (CJA 2003) the court should try all the possible means of community sentence and fine before passing a custodial sentence (CJA 2003) s.152 (2). However, if a sentence is fixed by law, as in the fire arms offences, repeated offences and dangerous offenders, the community sentence is not available (CJA 2003) s.150.

The new technology of tagging and monitoring offenders and suspects is regarded as a highly valuable kind of “prisons without walls”, because the traditional prison system is under question:

Prison might keep dangerous people off the street, but on the whole it does not make them better people- anything but. The prison service monitors the future criminal convictions of all inmates who are released from prison, and the statistics make depressing reading.

However, as it is defined in (CJA 2003), the community sentence, fines, surveillance and tagging may not work for all types of offenders; some sorts of offenders cannot be controlled without prison, as Wilson& Ashton said:

Although it is our belief that the British prison population is currently too high, some criminals clearly need to be locked up, both as a punishment to them and to protect society. The question is, what type of prison system should we be locking them up in? The general answer has to be one that makes them better people when they come out.

It can be argued that community sentence combines many targets of punishment together, as offenders get punishment by several means and it will work better than prisons in rehabilitating and deterring them from re-offending.

Politicians viewed community service as an attractive option because it blended punishment and reparation. Ideally it also brought about the rehabilitation of the offender.

At the conclusion it can be argued that the new measures may help in reducing the number of people sent to prison and the number of re-offenders at the same time. However, we should not forget that a number of offenders should get custodial sentence as the only possible punishment, but which kind of prison should be called prison of the future:

For most offenders, imprisonment has to be justified in terms of public protection, denunciation or retribution. Otherwise it can be an expensive way of making bad people worse.