Prison sentences: last resort or the default sanction?

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the sentencing purposes for penal penalties, judges’ perceptions of sentencing purposes and prison sentences, and the effects of penal sanctions. We examine judges’ positions towards different penalties, with a focus on imprisonment, since their views on the different penalties are related to their sentencing decision-making. Understanding these views is then critical for several practical and political purposes, including bridging the gap between academic discourse and legal practice. We accessed judges’ views on penal sanctions through a questionnaire and an interview. Our sample is compounded by the judges of the criminal courts from the three major cities in Portugal. Despite the most recent criminological empirical knowledge, judges valued imprisonment as the most adequate sentence, both for different crimes and for different judicial purposes. This result is not consistent with viewing imprisonment as a ‘last resort’ solution. Indeed, we did not find this ‘last resort’ position in our data, and it is not apparent in the judicial statistics on imprisonment rates. Our data highlight the importance of increasing judges’ training on criminological and sociological issues as well as the importance of changing the influence of their personal beliefs regarding penal sanctions into research-based positions.

KEYWORDS:

• Correctional effectiveness
• prisons
• penal sanctions
• sentencing
• judges’ accounts

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Andreia de Castro Rodrigues http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0992-8572

Ana Sacau http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8459-8104

Jorge Quintas de Oliveira http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5965-4517

Rui Abrunhosa Gonçalves http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5978-8141

Notes

1. There are many additional authors who proposed distinct categorizations, such as McFatter (1978), who only considered the three sentencing strategies of retribution, rehabilitation and deterrence, and Mackenzie (2005), who replaced retribution with denunciation.

2. Foucault (1999) discusses several reasons that may justify why prisons did not trigger a strong negative reaction by the criminal justice system, foreseeing it as the bleakest area of that system.

Additional information

Funding

This study was conducted at Psychology Research Centre (UID/PSI/01662/2013), University of Minho, and supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education through national funds and co-financed by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007653). The study was also supported by Grant SFRH/BPD/108602/2015 from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology awarded to the first author.