Incarceration - Alternatives To Incarceration

Alternatives To Incarceration

History

Before the 1950s, the Canadian Judiciary had few options for punishment of offenders. The judiciary was limited to incarcerating the offender, issuing a fine, placing the offender on probation, or giving the offender a discharge. In the 1960s and 1970s however, crime rates increased drastically. This created a large influx of people becoming incarcerated in prisons, resulting in overcrowding. The overcrowding of prisons left the government financially stressed, leaving them unable to pay the workers, maintain the prisons, and house the inmates. There was also growing evidence and concern that incarcerating offenders was not a successful deterrent to crime, or reducing recidivism. In an effort to save money and hopefully reduce recidivism rates, alternatives to incarceration were created.

Conditional Sentences

Conditional sentences were first introduced in 1996 in an attempt to reduce the amount of inmates in a quickly growing prison population. Conditional sentences, which are also known as indeterminate sentences, are sentences that are served outside of the prison walls and in the community with some sort of restrictions or conditions placed on the offender. The requirements or conditions may include mandatory programs such as a drug or alcohol treatment seminars, curfews, house arrest, or electronic monitoring. Most offenders who receive conditional sentences are low risk and are usually serving time for impaired driving where no death occurred. When an offender receives a conditional sentence of home confinement in comparison to incarceration, the offender is still able to see family members, maintain a normal job, and attend school. This is a huge advantage to conditional sentencing, since offenders are not completely cut off from the external world. Although the offender is not locked away in a prison cell, the offender is still expected to stay at home during certain times of the day or night. In order to verify that offenders are abiding by the restrictions placed on them, electronic monitoring is often used. The development of GPS, which allows law enforcement agencies to know the exact location of the offender by the use of satellites, has increased the effectiveness of offenders serving home confinement sentences drastically. Offenders can now easily be identified and tracked down through the use of GPS allowing law enforcement officers to quickly move in to make an arrest when an offender is in breach of their conditions.

Boot Camp

Boot camps are another alternative to incarceration. Boot camps as described by O’Grady are “correctional institutions where inmates are treated like army cadets." The majority of inmates who participate in boot camps are most commonly youth. The main goal of the camp is to teach the inmates discipline, since many advocates of boot camps hypothesize that youth who have troubles with the law is a result of a lack of discipline. Upon completion of the boot camp, the hope is that the inmate will learn respect and discipline, along with destroying any bad attitudes they may have, therefore reducing the likelihood of recidivism. The true effectiveness of boot camps has been under much speculation. O’Grady reveals a study produced by Wright and Mays (1998), who compared recidivism rates of first time offenders that attended a boot camp, to those who were on probation or served time in prison. The results of the study indicated that those who attended the boot camps were actually at a higher risk of reoffending than those who were in the other two groups. Although this research indicates boot camps may not be completely effective, other research has been conducted in the United States that reveal some boot camps are more effective in reducing recidivism than others. Under further analysis however, the boot camps that are more effective in reducing recidivism is not due to the boot camp itself. The aftercare that the boot camps provided for the offenders to help reintegrate them back into society, and help guide them away from a life of crime, is the true reason behind the success of these boot camps. Due to the lack of strong evidence supporting boot camps, coupled with the rising cost of running the programs, many boot camps have shut down across the United States.