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Topic History of: Scrapping short sentences gets closer Max. showing the last 5 posts - (Last post first)
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hedda
repeating my tale..when a Danish acquaintance many years ago got 18 months for an attempted bank robbery he was actively encouraged while inside to work on a career for his release.
They even allowed him to make moves to set up a video importing business whilst inside so that when he left jail..he had a ready made job to go to and he became one of Denmark most successful importer of movies on video (remember videos?)
Sounds bloody sensible to me.
His crime: he rented a room opposite a bank and put a store dummy at the window holding a broom..rang the bank manager and said "I have a marksman with a gun trained on your bank and he'll shoot a customer unless you hand over a bag of cash"
The manager went and looked and came back and said.." your marksman seems to have collapsed"..the dummy had fallen over.
he got caught because he rented the room in his own name.
wyot
There are alternatives to short 6 month or under sentences; they are called community orders, been around years.
Trouble is, nearly all who receive these prison sentences have had mutiple such orders before and still re-offend. The 3rd sector drug and mental health interventions are not available sufficiently to the offenders, or for their massively overstretched Probation Officers to refer then to because of Tory cuts.
All political smokescreens to just cut cost of prison places..They should be honest about it and put more resources into Probation services and the third sector organisations who support their work.
But that of course would no go down well with Daily Mail readers...and is - yawn - nuanced...