Justice Reinvestment and Other Methods of Reducing Crime and Re-Offending - Coursework Example

Justice Reinvestment and Other Methods of Reducing Crime and Re-Offending Name: Course: Tutor: Date: Introduction One of the most politically challenging and economically pressing problems that the society faces in the 21st century is how to deal with law breakers. Imprisonment is the harshest form of punishment for countries that do not have death penalty as a form of punishment. Different countries manage their prisons differently, that is, prisons differ from one country to another in terms of their basic philosophies, their activities, their regimes, and their physical conditions. They differ from therapeutic communities to boot camps and from open to maximum security prisons. There are also differences in terms of how prison systems are financed and organised by their respective governments (Allen, 2007, p. 5). From a global perspective, it is a common fact that the prison population does not represent the entire society. A large proportion of the prison population emanates from the poor segment of the society. They are drawn disproportionately from poor neighbourhoods and locations where a variety of health, communal, and social problems are concentrated. This partly depicts the fact that people who are financially and socially marginalised are more likely to be drawn to criminal tendencies, and partly shows why law enforcement agencies including the police concentrate their efforts in these areas (Allen, 2007, p. 5). It is therefore important to develop crime prevention areas in these areas and seek effective alternative means other than prisons to deal with offenders and counter offenders. Use of prisons should only be applicable when dealing with persistent, serious, and dangerous offenders. This paper aims to highlight and discuss the similarities and differences between justice reinvestment and other means of mitigating crime and re-offending. Justice Reinvestment The term “justice reinvestment” has its genesis in the United States and is used to define the strategy to productively use funds spent on imprisoning offenders in the aforementioned areas where crime thrives. This is done through locally based community initiatives specifically developed to address the underlying problems that lead to and enhance criminal behaviour. This fresh approach to criminal justice gives the local government authority to decide how funds should be appropriately applied in promoting safer local communities. There are two main elements in this respect. First, justice reinvestment aims at developing standards and policies to not only improve the prospects of individual cases but also to improve specific ones. Second, justice reinvestment incorporates a strategic approach aimed at preventing offending and re-offending by gathering and evaluating data to make informed decisions on how and where to appropriately channel funds in an effort to mitigate crime (Wright, 2008, p. 11; Allen, 2007, p. 5). These two elements amplify the inherent effective nature of the justice reinvestment system based on the fact they are directly aimed at addressing and reducing the root cause of the problem at hand. According to a report by the Justice Committee on Reducing Crime (Ministry of Justice, 2010, p 3), focus should be on mitigating re-offending, with custody being reserved only for those offenders who really deserve to be in custody. The committee’s report states that this is the most effective measure to develop a stronger and safer community. The government shares the same sentiments that the use of prisons should only be applied in a responsible and measured manner on behalf of the larger community. This entails making sure that the prison is only used as an option when it is necessary to reform and punish offenders. Community Policing Another measure that assumes a more or less similar approach to that of justice reinvestment is the various forms of community policing. Community policing is basically collaboration between the community and the police that ascertains and solves communal problems. The police are not the sole guardians of law and order any more, the community today is actively involved in enhancing a safe community. Community policing has far-reaching effects: the expansive outlook on crime prevention and control and the key emphasis on making members of the community active participants in the problem solving process. The patrolling officer in the neighbourhood with the support of the police organisation assists members of the community to garner resources and support in an effort to address the underlying challenges (Bureau of Justice Assistance, 1994, p. 9). It is imperative that communities be empowered to reduce crime incidences and create a safer society. Community policing entails police officers getting familiar with members of the respective communities that they protect, and if possible on an individual basis. By so doing, the officers are able to acquire useful information on criminal activities and those who perpetrate them. They also acquire realistic evaluations on community members’ needs and expectations of the police (Bureau of Justice Assistance, 1994, p. 9). Community Crime Prevention Normally, community-based crime prevention is deemed to be an integration of situational and developmental crime prevention. Sherman (2002, p 165) defines community based-crime prevention as actions aimed at changing the social structure believed to breed crime within the community. More often than not, crime prevention programmes are delivered to the community through structures like the local social institutions. The local social establishments could take the form of churches, youth groups, families, and so on. Some of the different forms of community based programmes entail prevention of gang membership, community mobilisation, gang member intercession, gun buy back and afterschool recreation programmes (Sherman, 2002, p 165). This implies that the community setting is the most appropriate set up within which crime prevention programmes can be effectively implemented. Situational Crime Prevention Strategy Another key crime prevention strategy is situational crime prevention. This strategy aims at mitigating crime incidences by reducing the rewards of crime and increasing the risks of committing crime. The approach is founded on ideologies of crime causation that hypothesize that offenders make rational choices to commit crime along the basis of projected costs and rewards. Through assessment of crime patterns in their respective communities and criminal events within the social context, the situation can be changed to lessen the possibility of a motivated criminal to commit an offence (Linden, 2007, p 141). The situational aspect has received empirical support much stronger than any other prevention measure. Situational crime prevention strategy turns the community’s attention to the criminal event. Measures such as increasing watch on potential criminal targets or making them less attractive can assist them in negating or mitigating crime. The situational crime prevention strategy emanated from the United Kingdom where researchers from the Home Office came to a conclusion that a conventional justice systems’ response to crime had a little impact on mitigating crime (Linden, 2007, p. 141). The motivation behind development of situational crime prevention strategy was a research carried out in the 1960s and 1970s which revealed that misbehaviour in correctional facilities was more attributed to how the institution was managed as opposed an individual’s inherent character. Other studies revealed that geographical elements such as where bars were located could be used to describe crime patterns and gave more support to the rise of the situational crime prevention strategy (Linden, 2007, p. 141). Similarities The main similarity all the approaches to crime prevention strategy highlighted above is that they are all aimed at alleviating crime from the society. Despite the fact that all these measures against crime take different approaches, the bottom line is that by and large their basic aim is to reduce or prevent crime occurrences. This fact is supported by the Social Justice Report (2009, p. 10) which states that Justice Reinvestment does not only entail reforming the criminal justice system but also attempts to deter people from getting there in the first place. Linden (2007, p. 155) shares similar views; he states that investment in situational crime prevention strategy is essential if crime and victimisation have to be reduced. There is adequate evidence that situational crime prevention strategies can have crime deterrent effects beyond their operational scope (Marshall et al, 2004, p. 6). This implies that basically, the situational crime prevention strategy is first and foremost aimed at reducing crime incidences. Community policing is also aimed at crime alleviation, in fact, community policing takes a more direct approach to addressing crime alleviation compared to the other two approaches. Community policing involves the police getting up and close with members of the community, identifying crime and crime related problems, and addressing the same (Bureau of Justice Assistance, 1994, p. 9). Community-based crime prevention is also aimed at mitigating crime and crime-related incidences from the society. It can therefore be concluded that one of the common factors in these approaches is the fact that they are aimed essentially at mitigating and eliminating crime from the community. Another area that these four approaches share a common factor is in terms of how effective they are with regards to crime reduction and re-offending. It is one thing to reduce crime in the society and another to maintain the same in the long-term. Designing responses to offenders entails providing individuals with proper housing, getting them off drugs, supporting them with employment, and giving them suitable medical and social services. Attaining these objectives requires close bondage with partners who are directly in charge of delivering suitable programmes and services through various initiatives aimed at crime mitigation. There is also need to espouse that fact that not all offenders must be punished through jails. Incidentally, even some offenders who go to jails will at some point get released (Siegel, 2010, p. 92). To this end, it is important that these offenders be integrated into programmes aimed at addressing crimes by considering their effective nature. Under Justice Reinvestment, information is gathered and applied in addressing the underlying issues that might culminate to crime within the society. The situational crime prevention strategy also operates within the same ideologies as justice reinvestment. Information with regard to crime is gathered and the same is applied to identify crime situations in an attempt to alleviate the same. Community policing is also about acquiring relevant information in an attempt to use the information in curtailing crime incidences. According to Cherney (2006, p. 2) to ensure that a particular crime prevention strategy has been successfully implemented and is effective, deep understanding of the theory - the information gathered in this regard with reaction to the subject, is essential. This is a common feature of all crime prevention measures highlighted above. Differences The key difference between justice reinvestment and other crime prevention measures is in terms of what really drives their development or designing. According to the Justice Committee (2010, p. 5), development of justice reinvestment is influenced by three factors. First is the lack of common approach towards the criminal justice system’s goals by its various agencies against substantial public funding directed towards operating the system. The criminal justice system is being faced by sustainability crisis. Generally, the public expenditure is under pressure from every dimension. The justice committee states that programmes aimed at addressing rehabilitation are worth running in prison where offenders are locked up and in sight. For instance this can involve dealing with offending characters on the one hand, and improving self confidence and skills on the other. However, a more economic approach would be to invest in substantial rehabilitation programme aimed at potential law breakers with the key aim of steering them off crime and custody (Justice Committee Report, 2010, p.19). According to the Prison Reform Trust (2010, p. 4), 800 prisoners are held in 39 prisons while a little over 1000 prisoners are held in 24 prisons. 620 prisoners is the average size of the prison’s population. A prison with a population of 400 prisoners or less can be efficiently managed or run compared to a prison accommodating more than 800 prisoners. As of 18th June 2010, England and Wales had a prison population of 85,085 prisoners with an imprisonment rate of 154 per population 100,000. The prison population in England and Wales has grown by 66% or 32,500 between 1999 and 2009. For a long period, the government has heavily been investing in providing education for offenders. This has multiplied three times from 57 million pounds in 2001 to 2002, to 175 million pounds from 2009 to 2010. Financing drug treatment in prison has also risen on an annual basis in 2009/ 2010 to 15 times what it was in 1997. The total figure as of 2009-2010 stands at 122 million pounds with a large percentage of the prison population engaging in treatment. The cost of one prisoner is £45, 000 per annum in addition to £170, 000 spent on constructing and maintaining a new place (Justice Committee Report, 2010, p.13). According to the National Audit Estimates, a 2-year highly intensive community order entailing contact with a probation officer twice per week, 80 hours of unpaid labour, and mandatory completion of accredited programmes costs 4200 pounds per each offender. Evidence according to the Justice Committee reveals that the use of prisons to punish offenders and re-offenders is an ineffective measure with an exception of serious offenders. The committee states that prison is a very expensive form of dispensing justice. It is worth noting that the prison population has virtually doubled since 1992 (House of Commons Justice Committee, 2009-10, p. 7). Of even much interest is that the rates of house hold crime and violent crime have both dropped by 46 percent (Duffy et al, 2007, p. 79). The National Audit Office (2009, p. 4) reveals that the commonly convicted prisoners are those with short sentences. This basically implies that a significant proportion of the prison population are more of petty offenders as opposed to hardcore ones. And this is what justice reinvestment seeks to address. Justice reinvestment seeks to develop a data driven approach in an effort to reduce spending on corrections and reinvest the amount saved on measures and strategies that can reduce crime and increase safety in the society. Spending by the government to construct more prisons to accommodate more prisoners is an expensive, unsustainable, and unsuccessful approach based on statistics showing that the prison population is ever increasing particularly in the past two decades (Prison Reform Trust, 2010, p. 7). Whereas justice reinvestment is aimed at steering prospective offenders and re-offenders off prison through addressing the problem’s root cause at a local level, the situational crime prevention strategy partly assumes the same approach but is run by the central government as opposed to the local one. The development of justice reinvestment is driven by the need to decongest prisons and channel the funds spent on running correctional facilities on other measures that are more effective in reducing crimes compared to prisons (Council of State Governments Justice Centre, n.d., p 1). Thus justice reinvestment can be viewed as a measure of economically applying funds in effective strategies hence reducing unnecessary expenses. With the situational crime prevention strategy on the other hand, the basic aim is not to manage finance per se, but to alleviate crime in general. With this approach, the issue of funds does not come into perspective. The basic aim is to reform an individual with criminal tendencies through offering rational choice on the prospective crime (Linden, 2007, p 142; Gilling, 1997, p.186). The key assumption behind the rational choice theory is that crime is an intentional behaviour by an individual which is developed to satisfy the offender’s ordinary needs such as money, status, excitement, sex, and so on. It follows that meeting these needs sometimes entails making rudimentary choices and decisions constrained by ability and time limits as well as accessibility of relevant information. Rational choice does not concentrate on a respective individual’s past, but rather on the prevailing situational dynamics. The theory acknowledges the fact that not all crime is attributed to the indifferent social processes. Therefore, the assessment of specific crime problems is the key to comprehending the dynamics of the offense (Linden, 2007, p.142; Vellani, 2007, p. 162). This is in contrast to the justice reinvestment approach that gathers data including respective individuals’ background. Additionally, the justice reinvestment approach concentrates more on the society and the community at large with the assumption that crime is attributed to the same social processes. Compared to justice reinvestment, community policing is a forged partnership between the community members and the police to identify criminal elements within the society and getting rid of them (Lombardo, et al, p. 73, 2010; Forst & Dempsey, 2009, p. 375). The approach espoused by community policing is in contrast to justice reinvestment, where the latter is aimed at reforming individuals and steering them off prison while community policing on the other hand overlooks the reform approach. To this end, community policing can be deemed as being aimed at filling prisons with criminal elements within the society. Another area of relevance with regards to the inherent differences between Community Policing and Justice Reinvestment is that the latter is more inclined at saving the government’s expenditure on correctional facilities deemed ineffective. Instead, justice reinvestment is aimed at channelling the funds saved towards other strategies considered more effective compared to prisons. Community policing is not aimed at cutting on government expenditure, rather, it is aimed at changing the community’s perspective towards the police. Incidentally, community policing is aimed for members of the community to work in collaboration with the police in an attempt to address pressing criminal issues within the society (Glenn, 2003, p. 103). Justice reinvestment on the other hand entails the local government working hand-in-hand with the community members to address situations that might culminate to crime. In essence, justice reinvestment gathers relevant information pertaining to situations that might lead to criminal offenses. It should be noted that community-based crime prevention strategies are quite distinct from justice reinvestment. These two are different in the sense that whereas one is aimed at reforming criminals, the other is aimed at preventing potential crime. Sherman (2002, p 165) is of the opinion that community-based crime prevention is basically aimed at curtailing crime from its roots. That is, it is aimed at rooting out crime from the community through various programmes hence containing crime-related incidences. In the process of mitigating crime from its root causes, community based crime prevention measures reform potential criminals to refrain from their criminal deeds (Sherman, 2002, p 165). Justice reinvestment according to Wright (2008, p 11), is not only aimed at preventing criminal offenders, it is also aimed at reforming criminals already charged with criminal offences - hence its clear distinction from community-based crime prevention policies. Conclusion An invariable approach to community safety and crime prevention entails an ideal, comprehensive understanding of the main challenges facing the community, sufficient resources to address these problems, and an effective strategy on how to deliver the appropriate programmes developed towards the same. It is worth noting that different situations call for different strategies, hence it is necessary that appropriate strategies be developed to suit respective criminal environments and situations. Incidentally, to address criminal elements within the society it is essential that a proper assessment be carried out on the respective communities and on the strategy to be implemented. With regards to crime prevention measures, justice reinvestment has an edge over the other measures applied on crime prevention. This is based on the fact that justice reinvestment assumes a local approach in tackling criminal issues within the society, hence a direct approach in contrast to other crime preventive measures. Justice reinvestment has an edge over other approaches to crime prevention in the sense that it aims at cutting government expenditure on prison constructions against the background that prison facilities are deemed ineffective. Subsequently, justice reinvestment channels the saved funds to other areas deemed effective with regard to crime prevention. It is along this basis, that justice reinvestment as a crime preventive measure is deemed more effective compared to other crime preventive measures. Reference List Allen, R. & Stern, V. Justice Reinvestment - A New Approach to Crime and Justice, International Centre for Prison Studies King’s College London – School of Law Bureau of Justice Assistance, 1994, Understanding Community Policing: A Framework for Action, Response Centre, Washington D.C. Cherrney, A. 2006, “Problem solving for crime prevention,” Australian Government: Australian Institute of Criminology, Available from http://www.aic.gov.au/ (9 March 2011). Duffy, B., Wake, R., Burrows, T. & Bremner, P. 2007, Closing the gaps - crime and public perceptions, Ipsos Mori, London. Forst, L. & Dempsey, J. 2009, An Introduction to Policing, Cengage Learning, Clifton Park, New York. Gilling, D. 1997, Crime prevention: theory, policy, and politics, Routledge, London. Glenn, R. 2003, Training the twenty first century police officer, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica. House of Commons Justice Committee, 2009-2010, Cutting crime: the case for justice reinvestment, The Stationery Office Limited, London. Justice Centre- the Council of State Governments, n.d, Justice Reinvestment: Overview. New York City, available from http://www.justicecenter.csg.org (9 March 2011). Linden, R. 2007, Situational Crime Prevention: It’s Role in Comprehensive Prevention Initiatives, Department of Sociology, University of Manitoba. Marshall, B., Smith, C. & Tilley, N. 2004, “Using Situational Crime Prevention in Small Areas,” The Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, Available from http://www.jdi.ucl.ac.uk (9 March 2011). Ministry of Justice 2010, Government response to the Justice Committee’s Report: Cutting Crime the case for justice reinvestment,. The Stationery Office Limited, London. National Audit Office 2010, Managing Offenders on Short-Term Custodial Sentences, The Stationary Office, London. Prison Reform Trust 2010, Bromley Prison Briefing, Prison Reform Trust. Schroeder, D. & Lombardo, F.2010, Barron's Police Sergeant Examination, Barron's Educational Series, New York. Sherman, L, 2002, Evidence-based crime prevention, Routledge, Madison Ave. New York. Siegel, L.2010, Criminology: The Core, Cengage Learning, Belmont CA. Vellani, K. 2007, Strategic security management: A risk assessment guide for decision makers, Butterworth-Heinemann, Jordan Hill Oxford. Wright, M. 2008, Making Good: Prisons, Punishment and Beyond, Waterside Press, Hampshire. Read More