Michael Kelly: Lock 'em up and throw away the key to recidivism

THE public are a bloodthirsty and irrational lot. Outrage and anger follow the release of poor old Jim Devine, whose greed led to the end of his comfortable if not spectacularly successful political career.

His punishment was being caught and being subjected to the humiliating court process that followed. A prison sentence of any length merely added to his shame. It also added to the cost to taxpayers, who were already out of pocket to the tune of 8,385 as a result of his Westminster expenses fraud.

It cost nearly twice that to keep him in jail for the four months he served. But the reaction to his early release indicates that many stalwart citizens would be happy to meet their share of that cost for the satisfaction of seeing him banged up for the whole of his 16-month sentence. For too long this quest for vengeance has been allowed to drive much of penal policy when study after study has indicated that in terms of deterring criminals, prison does not work.

The fault for the misconception that it does must be laid not only at the door of an ignorant public but also on those social scientists who based their conclusions on the assumption of rational behaviour on the part of law breakers. It has now been demonstrated in one authoritative study that the deterrent effect of an additional month of expected sentence declines among those who have been in prison before. This conclusion is supported by the Howard League for Penal Reform and the Prison Governors' Association, who say the experiences of prisoners and staff indicate that the potential deterrent effect of serving a short sentence is lost for repeat offenders.

On the other hand, recent Home Office research shows that community-based sentences, such as graffiti cleaning, litter collecting, graveyard repairs and anger management courses, cut reoffending more effectively - 44 per cent of criminals who are given community penalties are reconvicted within two years, compared with 56 per cent of those sent to jail. A satisfying bonus to this for the hardliners is that repeat offenders would chose a short prison sentence, which they regard as getting the problem out of the way, rather than community service, which they see as dragging it on. If the idea is to punish them we certainly shouldn't be giving them what they want.

It was evidence like this which provoked the last Scottish Government rightly to press ahead with its plans, in the face of Labour and Tory opposition, to scrap jail terms of three months or less. There is a strong case for extending this to cover sentences of less than one year. But opposition is fierce. Witness the flack that Kenneth Clarke attracted with his proposals to do exactly that in England.They were based partly on his depressing experience of leaving the job of home secretary in the early 1990s, when the prison population in England was 45,000, and taking office again in 2010, with it having risen to 85,000 and plans in place to raise it to more than 1000,000. The financial crisis in public expenditure gave Clarke the opportunity to abandon these plans, but the hostility he faced from fellow Tories inhibited his going as far as he wanted with bold reform.

The same irrationality that is the hallmark of the right has also infected the Labour Party. Despite the evidence presented to it, the last UK government was pressing ahead with a prison-building programme. In Scotland, the party has campaigned for mandatory prison sentences for knife-carrying, as if specifying the crime somehow nullified the evidence that prison is not, in general, an effective deterrent. Its argument for prison - that it relieves hard-pressed communities from lawbreakers in their midst - smacks more of respite care than of a coherent penal policy.

Multiple deprivation causes crime. The vast majority of Scotland's prison population comes from areas where young people have never been given the opportunities to build for themselves a decent life. A combination of disadvantage and personal issues caused by dysfunctional families leads them to turn to crime. So it is the poor and the vulnerable who are locked up, and locked up in larger numbers than in the rest of the European Union. And of course because prison doesn't work, we are locking up the same people again and again.

This persuasive analysis by the Howard League for Penal Reform in Scotland was intended to support the changes it is demanding of the new Scottish government. Its first demand should receive the support of John Swinney, hard pressed juggling budget priorities, as much as Kenny MacAskill, who has been known to release the odd prisoner early. It is to close some prisons, offering amnesties to those not posing a threat to safety. Even if the money saved was simply "saved", that would force the use of more creative and effective sentencing.

The league would go further. If the savings made on prisons were invested in communities in, for example, early years and parenting support, activities for young people, addressing truancy and school exclusion, and in more community sentencing, then a start would be made on an effective policy that would be "tough on crime and the causes of crime".

It's a programme that only brave politicians will subscribe to because it sounds weak and criminal-friendly - a policy harking back to the permissive Sixties rather than forward to the austere Teens. Devine's release indicates how atavistic is the public's view of crime and punishment. References to rationality, effectiveness and cost have little effect. The public wants blood. We all know the feeling. Even capital punishment becomes an attractive option when our car is stolen.But civilised people would not advocate vengeance as public policy even if it were proved to work. But it doesn't. That's the fact. A victim-centred penal policy is one that offers the long term hope of reducing the numbers affected by crime rather than pandering to a public opinion that derives perverse comfort and satisfaction from a costly exercise that merely exacerbates the problem.