Short-term treatment of adult offenders

Abstract

A study of the short-term treatment of offenders must inevitably be based on recent developments in the field of social controls in general and penal policy in particular in developed communities. Hence one must consider: (a) the imprisonment crisis - many countries now tend to replace long sentences by medium or short sentences, and to develop methods which simply restrict liberty or are outright alternatives for imprisonment. This decrease in prison sentences seems to show that there is a new trend towards a more social rather than merely penal treatment of offenders. And this is consistent with a desire to avoid, as far as possible, stigmatising the individual with imprisonment which may constitute a serious obstacle to his social rehabilitation and may even become a factor in 'secondary deviation'; (b) the difficulty of imposing imprisonment in view of both the increase in the number of offenders and the improvement in treatment standards, and the fact that imprisonment is less easily tolerated by those subjected to it than in the last century; (c) particularly in advanced societies, social attitudes towards offenders might undergo a change. Indeed it is already possible that in the future the treatment of offenders will be considered more and more as an aspect of social management rather than a simple matter of adjusting penalties.