Sentence appropriate?

[indalo]

In this morning's BBC internet news pages, there is the tale of Professor Donal McNally, a cyclist, severely injured as a result of a collision last year.

The driver of the vehicle which hit him was convicted not of careless driving but of dangerous driving. Although she pleaded guilty to the charge, she was sentenced only to an 18 month driving ban and 150 hours community work. I used the word only because I believe the sentence was too light but others may have a different view.

My main reason for taking the view I have is that I cannot see how there is any element of deterrence for others within that sentence. Three cyclists died on Nottinghamshire's roads during 2010 and Professor McNally could quite easily have been a fourth victim yet a court, with an opportunity to hand down a real, punitive sentence which might just have grabbed the attention of drivers around the country, chose to pass sentence more appropriate to a charge of careless driving.

Frankly, I'm disgusted and until the courts get tough with motoring crime, cyclists will continue to die on our roads Had the driver in this case been sentenced, say, to 5 years imprisonment, it would probably have been headline news and might, just might, have acted as a wake-up call to some of the selfish, the aggressive and the downright dangerous cretins who populate our overcrowded roads.

Disgusted,
Indalo

 

[morphix]

In this morning's BBC internet news pages, there is the tale of Professor Donal McNally, a cyclist, severely injured as a result of a collision last year.

The driver of the vehicle which hit him was convicted not of careless driving but of dangerous driving. Although she pleaded guilty to the charge, she was sentenced only to an 18 month driving ban and 150 hours community work. I used the word only because I believe the sentence was too light but others may have a different view.

My main reason for taking the view I have is that I cannot see how there is any element of deterrence for others within that sentence. Three cyclists died on Nottinghamshire's roads during 2010 and Professor McNally could quite easily have been a fourth victim yet a court, with an opportunity to hand down a real, punitive sentence which might just have grabbed the attention of drivers around the country, chose to pass sentence more appropriate to a charge of careless driving.

Frankly, I'm disgusted and until the courts get tough with motoring crime, cyclists will continue to die on our roads Had the driver in this case been sentenced, say, to 5 years imprisonment, it would probably have been headline news and might, just might, have acted as a wake-up call to some of the selfish, the aggressive and the downright dangerous cretins who populate our overcrowded roads.

Disgusted,
Indalo

Hear hear, I totally share your sentiments Indalo. I think it's a disgusting idea of justice.

Really a prison sentence would be more appropriate for dangerous driving. Fair enough, the prisons are full to capacity, but I think an 18 month driving ban is a bloody insult to the victim.

Perhaps a better way to go about punishing these people is to make them pay out substantial financial compensation to the victim if they receive severe injuries and to ban them from driving for 10 years at least. If it's a fatality from dangerous or careless driving, a ban for life seems appropriate. People who can't drive safely and put other peoples lives at risk, particularly cyclists..should not be behind the wheel.

 

[flecc]

There is a trend to move away from prison sentences into other forms like community service, partly since the huge costs of prison sentencing punish all of us. Increasingly the guideline on the choice of punishment is protection of the community. Since the driving ban carried out that function, the judge would not have to consider that aspect of an imprisonment, so could avoid it in favour of other options.

Community service is a very irksome thing for most people, it's not an easy option, and 150 hours can drag on for a very long time for anyone who is employed and can only serve the hours in their spare time and at times when facilities are available, so you can be sure it is a long lasting sentence. There is also a public shame aspect rather like the stocks of yesteryear, since those carrying out the work are often doing it in public and having to wear an identifying item of clothing showing what they are doing.

Personally I'm not keen on long sentences of any kind, since I don't see they do any good. The worst periods of any offender accounting for their behaviours are the first moments, the moment of arrest, the wait for trial, the first time a cell door slams shut, the first day, the first month, the first year of imprisonment. Extensions to those have nothing like the effect of the early moments, especially in the easy prison conditions that are commonplace, the time drifting past just as it does for those in mundane jobs and living circumstances on the outside. Mainly it's the taxpayer who is really being punished more by long sentences, and very often innocents like families including children, businesses and friends are punished by another's custodial sentence.

Greenland manages well with a very different regime. Not being able to have a prison infrastructure, offenders normaly have around three or four days in a police cell, even for a rape or murder. They are then released back into a community who don't wreak vengeance but see their civil duty as rehabilitation of the offender. It's an excellent system which costs nothing and has always worked much better than ours since their re-offending rate is minimal.
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[funkylyn]

Apart from the pros and cons of prison sentences I dont think we could in all honesty compare our system with that of Greenlands....great that it works there, but honestly....can you just IMAGINE what would happen here if we followed that system......the mind boggles

Lynda

 

[flecc]

Of course Lynda, I only mentioned that extreme to prise open minds to the range of possibilities.

The mistake I see being made here is that both posters above are not proposing to sentence for an offence but for the accidental outcome, and that is wrong. That's injustice, not justice.

An example. Two 25 year old drivers with identical hatchbacks drive along the same 30 limit road at 55 mph. The first is detected and penalised. The second has a pedestrian step out, he cannot stop due to his speed and the pedestrian is killed.

The offence is identical in both instances and for justice to be served, the punishment must be identical. The death was not an intended offence, the driver did not set out to do that, it was an accidental outcome. If society determines the punishment for that speeding is five years imprisonment, ok, both must serve that and we must embark on a vast prison building program to cope with all the speeders. But if society determines the punishment for that speeding is a fine, that is all either should receive, since their offences were identical.

The same goes for any particular type of dangerous driving, the consequential outcomes being irrelevant.
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[lemmy]

It's an excellent system which costs nothing and has always worked much better than ours since their re-offending rate is minimal.

The population Greenland is 56,000 with the largest city being Nuuk with a population of 15,000. In English parlance, that is a village and effectively any offender will be known to almost everyone. The comparison between Greenland and the UK is just too silly. In any case, it has an enormously high crime rate. USA cities comparably sized to Greenland's capital had rates per 1000 of 4.68 for personal crimes and 36.41 for property crimes in 2007. The same rates for Greenland were 9.97 for personal crimes and 28.86 for property crimes. I do not feel we have much to learn from Greenland.

I detect a certain mischievousness in your reply Flecc.

The point that is often missed also, is that offenders are not sent to prison as a first line of punishment. The best figures I can find indicate that a criminal will have offended at least 6 times and up to forty times before being handed a jail sentence.

Thus. it is no surprise that the ones sent to prison re-offend since they only go to prison if they have continued to offend after fines, community service and so on. As a matter of simple fact, 40% of those sentenced to community service never finish it, anyway.

We all want to find a magic bullet, longer prison sentences, no prison sentences but it doesn't exist. People often talk about harsher punishment as a deterrent. Louisiana, with capital punishment, has a murder rate of 11.8 per 100,000 people. Iowa, with no death penalty, has a rate of 1.1. The UK is 1.7.

The truth is that the game has been lost when that first offence is committed. It's in the early years that you stand a chance of preventing criminality. Once they've offended, the die is too often cast whatever we do.

For those who say long prison sentences don't work, I ask this question. Did Nelson Mandela re-offend?

 

[flecc]

The population Greenland is 56,000 with the largest city being Nuuk with a population of 15,000. In English parlance, that is a village and effectively any offender will be known to almost everyone. The comparison between Greenland and the UK is just too silly. In any case, it has an enormously high crime rate. USA cities comparably sized to Greenland's capital had rates per 1000 of 4.68 for personal crimes and 36.41 for property crimes in 2007. The same rates for Greenland were 9.97 for personal crimes and 28.86 for property crimes. I do not feel we have much to learn from Greenland.

I detect a certain mischievousness in your reply Flecc.

As my response to Lynda shows, I wasn't proposing relevance, just trying to open minds which so often have the one response to every incident, long prison sentences.

I can assure you there was no mischievousness, my reply was completely in earnest since the attitude of the British public with regard to sentencing disgusts me as much as the crimes.

The only way in which prison works is that offenders cannot offend while they are in, there hasn't been any worthwhile reformative value demonstrated. It is a fact that the average cost per offender being in prison greatly exceeds their average cost of being out in the community, and the majority of prisoners could be released into community service sentences instead and cost us far less.

Your example of Nelson Mandela shows how an eventual more positive response to behaviour brings rewards to the community, though I'm not proposing terrorists be appointed prime minister!
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[lemmy]

just trying to open minds which so often have the one response to every incident, long prison sentences.

It's not one response from the law since a person has to commit many offences before being served up a prison sentence and even then the first one is generally a short one.

As the figures show, in Scotland where the judiciary is less keen on prison sentences than England, it is not uncommon for a person to be given up to 40 fines and community service orders before finally going to prison. The recidivist rate is just as high for these punishments as it is for prison as this demonstrates.

As my son, who passed his law degree last year and has made a speciality of studying criminality, visited prisons and so on, noted to me recently, everyone and his dog thinks they know how to cut crime. But when you study it rationally and with access to the facts, you see that it is true that prison (often) does not work. Unfortunately, you also see that nor does anything else in our penal armoury.

It is the most intractable problems that have the most solutions.

 

[Orraman]

For those who cause harm to another while breaking the law:

Bring Back the Birch.

Sell tickets for the live show and the rights to ITV.
They could use their annual holidays to recover.
Cost would be low, I know of one who would do it for free.
The victims would Know there had been retribution.

Adventurous drivers would view this as a challenge, like Niagara Falls in a barrel, swimming the North Sea, no adventure is an adventure without some measure of uncertainty.

Dave

 

[flecc]

I think we are accidentally at cross purposes Lemmy. I'm not in any way proposing a solution to crime, just urging more rational responses to sentencing, and I think in fairness that my first post above made that clear.

The urge that the British public seem to have for more and longer prison sentences is madness, as is that of the main rival political parties who've both pandered to their wishes. Two reasons why that is so:

First, in just 17 years recently we doubled our prison population and sentences had been getting much longer in that period. One might reasonably expect that would have produced a substantial reduction in the incidence of crime, but in fact there was no appreciable change. Such fluctuations as occurred were more due to political tweaking of figures than any actual change.

Second, the same policies long pursued in the USA have amply demonstrated that the result is more crime and a ridiculously high proportion of people in prison.

Both these clearly indicate that we are on a silly course at present that just punishes the general population with ever increasing costs. Given that we have no proven solutions to crime, we should use the cheaper options like community service wherever possible, which as I've observed don't punish the innocent, be they taxpayers, relatives including children, businesses and friends.
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[andyh2]

Usually I feel pretty disappointed at the apparently light penalties given to drivers who kill pedestrians and cyclists. Your idea Flecc about the logic of sentencing being equal for the same offence makes me stop and think some. It does make sense, but don't we also change the name of the crime, depending on the circumstances, as well sometimes. If I hit someone with a hammer and injure them I might be prosecuted for GBH, but if I do the same and kill them that would be classed as manslaughter (assuming I didn't intend to which would be murder). I'd expect manslaughter to be a more serious charge although, like with the speeding car driver the action is the same.

In relation to crime, as far as I can see, a very large proportion of drivers just don't think of themselves as criminals when they speed. OK they (we?) know they're (we're?) breaking the rules, but how it feels to do that feels completely different to how I imagine it might feel to break into someone's house and steal things.

That's getting a bit off the main point, which for me is about road safety. As far as speeding is concerned those average speed cameras seem to work pretty well as the chance of getting caught is so high. Carried forward logically a comprehensive Big Brother speed monitoring system would seem to be the way to go. But really a much more attractive prospect would be to design and build the infrastructure so that cyclists and pedestrians are always prioritised in terms of safety and convenience and motorised vehicles (excepting 15mph ebikes of course!) have to fit in with that rather than the other way around, as it tends to be at present.

Something is seriously wrong if kids can't play outside safely near their homes, it's safer for parents to drive their kids to school than it is for them to walk or cycle there and commuting cyclists are at risk of being killed by left turning lorries.

On the whole I really do think this is more of an issue than the punishment or otherwise of someone after the event. It's too late then.

 

[flecc]

I very much agree with your conclusions Andy, preventing the problem is always better than dealing with it's results.

In the hammer example you give, there is a fundamental of GBH intent which justifies the reclassification as a result of the outcome. My argument is primarily about the avoidance of sentencing someone on the basis of solely accidental outcomes. It's these chance elements which have no place in justice.

Another thing I take great exception to is the notion of the victim playing a part in sentencing for that too has such widely differing outcomes. Two victims of the same offence, one vindictive and one a practicing Christian firmly believing in forgiveness, can influence a court into very different sentences.

The same crime should carry the same sentence, although there might an argument for proportionality. Someone of 30 years old receiving a sentence of ten years will typically have received a quarter remaining-life sentence, but at 70 it's effectively a life sentence without hope. That without hope element of despair makes it a much harsher sentence.

 

[HarryB]

I agree with Flecc about the outcome affecting the sentence. We had the same situation with the cyclist killing the girl crossing the road. Everybody was up in arms (including some useless mp) about his prison sentence being so small. His fault was riding too fast as a cyclist (expected to ride at 12 mph of course) and shouting get out of the way - he was unlucky and killed a girl. A similar situation with a driver driving down the road at the speed limit and using his horn to say 'get out of my way' would not have even made the papers.

With the case of this girl injuring the cyclist - I don't think we should be imprisoning people like this. She doesn't need to be taken out of society for our protection. I think a 10 year driving ban would be appropriate and sends out a clear message that poor driving is taken seriously.

Don't get me started on speeding which I think the government has trivialised by giving so many small fines for (often) minor transgressions which cannot be considered dangerous. I await the result of the Chris Huhnes investigation - everybody has the right to be innocent 'till proved guilty. However if it turns out he has passed on his points it shows how lightly some people in power take these offences. If proved guilty he should rightly spend some time behind bars, be banned from driving and holding public office.

 

[flecc]

I think a 10 year driving ban would be appropriate and sends out a clear message that poor driving is taken seriously.

This is a a very much better approach, a harsh sentence on the offender which costs the community nothing. Infinitely better than a prison sentence which punishes the community so widely and does no good since no sentence taches safe driving.

I await the result of the Chris Huhnes investigation - everybody has the right to be innocent 'till proved guilty. However if it turns out he has passed on his points it shows how lightly some people in power take these offences.

There's a very long tradition of contempt for roads law on the part of our elected leaders. The most notable must surely be the example of Quintin Hogg, one time Lord Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor, the supreme legal positions in our land.

His chauffeur tells of how when collecting him from home, Quintin would regularly hand him his briefcase and then say "race you to the office", setting off instantly on his Brompton. Quintin always won, since he would race across all the red traffic lights and generally break every roads law that got in the way. As an aside, he never wore a cycle helmet in his life, a bowler hat sufficing, and he eventually died at the great age of 94 years. So much for the "nanny state" crowd and their safety obsessions!

 

[indalo]

As the originator of this thread, I'm bound to say I'm disappointed at the lack of response from members of a cycling forum.

Having been away for a few days, I'm only now catching up with forum postings but I really thought that more of our members would have had something to say about this item. Of those who did make comment, I'm in agreement with those who support a hard line on issues involving road safety. Those who take a misguided, (in my opinion) liberal view on the wider issue of crime and punishment, are so out of touch with the world in which we live that their opinions are necessarily void by reason of irrelevance.

The liberal do-gooders have for far too long been allowed to influence policy on crime and punishment in the UK to the detriment of society. For as long as I can remember, their major plank of argument has been the selective use of statistics so spurious as to beggar belief, in an effort to support their position.

The one reason above all others why we have the level of crime in our society which we have today is quite simply because we have allowed the do-gooders to direct policy. It is difficult to pinpoint an exact moment in time when things went wrong but I can never remember any REAL political initiatives in recent times designed to deter criminals and to reduce crime. I can however, point to the abandonment of the stocks, the reduction in the number of offences which carried the death penalty as a maximum sentence; the abolition of capital punishment, the increase of remission for well-behaved prisoners, the softening of parole elegibility requirements as examples of how these ill-informed people have acted against the interests of society at large and for the benefit of the least deserving.

We will continue to mourn cyclists and pedestrians being mown down by morons on our roads because there is no punishment for offenders and certainly no deterrent for those others who drive recklessly on our roads. One day, that may change but not until groups like this take a strong, collective view and start lobbying those with power and influence.

Indalo

 

[flecc]

I wouldn't argue with much of that Indalo, as I said at one point above, if it's five years rather than a fine for a particular offence, ok. My argument is for consistency, not leniency, sentencing for the offence and not the accidental outcome.

Your mention of the stocks brings into focus how the scale of modern populations and lack of community have allowed crime of all kinds to flourish, there being no automatic community supervision of the kind possible within smaller population groups like the village of old.

However, although prison sentences are often appropriate, I don't believe very long prison sentences do any good for the reasons I gave above. The much longer sentences that have been increasingly popular since the 30 years passed on the Great Train robbers don't appear to have done any good, if the growth in all forms of crime are anything to go by.

Admittedly there aren't many effective alternatives, but in the case of driving offences, very much longer driving bans would be a good start since they really do hurt the offenders who are so often "car nuts". One or two year driving bans are not a big enough deterrent, and the driving ban should become an operating ban applying to all forms of vehicle including bicycles and e-bikes. The "chauffeur supplied" insurance schemes that regular drinkers subscribe to should also be banned, using them a clear sign of intent to drink and drive.

 

[mike killay]

Short prison sentences are equally useless. I had a relative sentenced to 3 months for assault. He spent 6 weeks in prison during which time he met up with old friends etc. He didn't suffer at all although his poor mother was motified.
Personally, I think Community Service could be improved. Lets not be so coy about it, call it and make it a chain gang with everyone having to wear clothes with arrows on them. To some extent this will compensate for the large anonymous populations we now have and bring in some sort of community oversight of the offenders. There are large numbers of tasks such as chewing gum and litter removal which could be usefully undertaken by offenders.
If you accept the tenets of Alcoholics anonymous, then there is nothing that you or society can do to change a person, only that person themselves can do it. And then a person in those circumstances will only change when they hit rock bottom. This is why the public rightfully dislike soft sentences, because they do not achieve anything, worse, they 'enable' the offender to continue on the wrong path. Punishments need to be severe, it's just that prison is not always the best and some sort of sentence that carries public identification, ridicule and humiliation is more likely to bring the criminal to rock bottom. Of course this would probably be a cruel and unusual punishment and therefore against the Human Rights Act