The affects of custodial vs non-custodial sanctions on reoffending: lessons from a systematic review (original) (raw)

The authors have just finalised a systematic review on the effects on re-offending of custodial and non-custodial («alternative») sanctions (Villettaz, Killias, & Zoder, 2006). Since the mid-19 th century, it was common knowledge, if not a dogma, that short-term imprisonment is «damaging» because, in the words first coined by Bonneville de Marsangy and later copied by von Liszt and many others, incarceration for shorter periods does not last long enough to «cure» criminal propensities (seen as a kind of a disease), but still too long to avoid first-time offenders to be exposed to the risk of contamination by hard-core criminals (Kuhn, 2000). Based on this quasi-medical theory of criminal contamination, von Liszt and many others ever since have stimulated the development of sanctions that do not imply custody, such as suspended sentences, probation, fines and later community work and electronic monitoring. Simultaneously and rather ironically, the same movement has also stimulated long-term incarceration and even incapacitation for offenders considered as sufficiently «sick» to warrant long-term «cures» in confinement. All these trends have been stimulated by the idea to offer better «alternatives» to custody, i.e. to reduce re-offending through more efficient «alternative» sanctions. Many such programs have been evaluated over the last decades worldwide , usually with results that confirmed the superiority of non-custodial over custodial sanctions. Keeping these backgrounds in mind, the Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Group invited the authors to start a systematic review of the evidence on whether or not custodial or non-custodial sanctions are more effective in preventing reoffending. This essay will give a resume of the methods and results of this meta-analysis. We shall conclude with an overview on how future evaluations of new sanctions and programmes could be made more convincing.