Martin Wright: We need restorative justice
May 25, 2009
While these figures do not directly relate to restorative justice, in my opinion they demonstrate the need for it.
In 1895, a British government committee on prisons, chaired by Herbert Gladstone, the brother of the former prime minister, found the following probabilities of a further prison sentence (paragraph 85):
| Number of Imprisonments |
Probability of Further Prison Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | 30% |
| 2 | 48% |
| 3 | 64% |
| 4 | 71% |
| 5 | 79% |
A century later, the Home Office found that in the first quarter of
2005, the one-year re-offending rate was:
| Previous Custodial Sentence |
One-Year Re-Offending
Rate |
|---|---|
| 0 | 26.0% |
| 1 | 43.0% |
| 2 | 51.7% |
| 3 | 57.0% |
| 4 | 60.8% |
| 5 | 62.7% |
| 6-10 | 88.6% |
| 11+ | 78.3% |
The data are not quite comparable, but the message is clear: Every time a person is sent to prison, he or she becomes more likely to re-offend. Perhaps it is time we learnt this lesson.
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