A01 Custodial Sentencing

• The aims of custodial sentencing


  Involves a convicted offender spending time in prison or other closed institution (young offender's or psychiatric).
• Detterence


  Designed to put off individuals from engaging in offending.
• General deterrence


  Aims to send a broad message to members of a given society that crime will not be tolerated
• Individual detterence


  Should prevent offender from committing and repeating same crime in light of their experience. Conditioning through punishment.
• Incapacitation


  Offender taken out of society to prevent them from reoffending as a means of protecting the public. Depends upon severity of crime.
• Retribution


  Society enacts revenge for crime by making offender suffer. Should be proportionate to the crime, 'eye for an eye'.
• Rehabilitation


  Idea of reform. Offenders should leave Prison as better adjusted and ready to take place in society.
• The psychological effects of custodial sentencing


  Stress and depression lead to suicide rates and self harm to increase in prisons.
• Institutionalisation and prisonisation


  Institutionalisation may cause inmates to not be able to function outside of prisons. Prisonisation is the way the prisoners are socialised into adopting an inmate code
• The problems of recidivism


  Statistics from ministry of justice suggest 57% of UK's offenders will reoffend within a year of release. UK and US have highest reoffending rates.
• Penal institutions


  Penal institutions are more open and there is much greater emphasis on rehabilitation and skill development (Norway). Critics labelled this as a soft option that is not a sufficient punishment.