Against Prisons: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

One positive result of this drastically diminished faith in the benefits of imprisonment is the marked shift of emphasis from incarceration to financial penalties. In Germany, e.g., the 20th century started with a ratio of three to one in favor of imprisonment over financial sanctions, and ended with a ratio of four to one in favor of financial sanctions over prison sentences. In the course of one century, the prison sentence moved from being a standard response to being a comparatively rare and exceptional response to crime. Of all those sentenced, less than 20 per cent received a prison sentence at the end of the 20th century - the large majority of prison sentences being suspended ones accompanied by probation orders. On some 5% of all convicts are being sentenced to immediate imprisonment. This percentage could, theoretically, be reduced even further - maybe to 4, 3, 2 or even 1 or zero per cent? To that end, judges would just have to refrain to an ever higher degree from handing out prison sentences, and if they did hand out prison sentences, they just would have to decide to grant probation to an ever increasing part of the culprits. At the same time, probation services could and should be substantially improved so that there would be ever less revocations of the suspended sentences. Decades ago, such a scenario of the fading out of the prison sentence had been envisaged as a possible course of action to be completed by the year 2000 (cf. Schumann 1988: 17). The fact that this date has passed by now does not mean that the prison has to exist from now to all eternity. It is still possible and still necessary to overcome this obsolete system of pain infliction.