Simply locking people up and throwing the key away doesn't work.

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There are at least four different reasons why a society might decide to imprison those who break its agreed rules, and the debate about an early release scheme – driven not by any concerns about justice or fairness, but by a lack of places in which to lock up even more offenders – doesn’t really seem to have paid a lot of attention to the balance between them.

The first is as a form of punishment, and this is the one which seems to have attracted all of the attention. Indeed, most demands for ‘justice’ seem to revolve around the length of a prison sentence handed down to an offender, with the degree of ‘justice’ delivered apparently depending mostly on the length of that sentence. And most of the outcry against the early release scheme has related to the idea that the level of punishment is being reduced.

The second reason is about public protection / prevention of re-offending. When it comes to the question of whether or not ‘prison works’, this is the one area in which one can say unequivocally that it does indeed work, because an individual locked in a cell cannot re-offend during the period of incarceration. Whether (s)he would have done so unincarcerated is much harder to answer.

The third reason is about deterrence. The underlying rationale is that if someone commits a crime and gets a lengthy sentence as a result, then it will deter others from committing the same crime. It is far from clear that this actually works, given that it assumes that the criminal is carefully weighing up the odds of being caught and found guilty before taking a rational decision as to whether to offend or not. A lot of crime (admittedly not all) is either opportunistic or committed in the heat of the moment – ‘deterrence’ is unlikely to make much of a difference.

The fourth reason is about rehabilitation / re-education – trying to ensure that offenders are unlikely to re-offend when released and can more easily re-assume their place in society. It’s an area where the UK justice system is notoriously bad – offenders are more likely to learn new ways of offending than new skills for their future.

The biggest problem with the UK government’s early release scheme is that it is primarily based on considering the category of crime committed rather than looking at all the circumstances of the offenders. So when an offender is considered by the public at large to be unsuitable for release, the government resorts to excluding all those who have committed the same or a similar crime. Even leaving aside the question about whether public rage (often whipped up by the tabloid press) is the right basis to determine whether an individual should or should not be released early, treating all those who have committed similar crimes in the way that the public demands one of them should be treated is a bit like abdicating responsibility to a mob.

Instead of debating whether we should really be locking up so many people (more than many other European countries), politicians have chosen to invent more crimes and equate ‘justice’ with longer terms in prison, competing to see who can mandate the longest and harshest sentences (in the belief that it will be popular), during which those imprisoned not only contribute nothing to society but also cost an ever-increasing sum to keep them economically inactive. Without building the extra spaces that such an approach inevitably requires. The result is a panic last minute response to a crisis of their own making which finds them with neither the time nor the resources to make a proper assessment of which prisoners should be released early and which should not. It’s a response which serves the interests of neither the prisoners themselves nor society at large. And there’s still no sign that the problem is really being recognised.