Public Opposition to Prison Alternatives and Community Corrections - A Strategy for Action

• NCJ Number: 86006
• Journal: Canadian Journal of Criminology Volume: 24 Issue: 4 Dated: (October 1982) Pages: 371-385
• Author(s): E A Fattah
• Date Published: 1982
• Length: 15 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Language: English
• Country: Canada

Annotation

The Canadian public's punitive attitude toward offenders inhibits the wide use of alternatives to incarceration, but this attitude can be changed through public education and community involvement in the structuring, selection, and operation of sentencing alternatives.

Abstract

Some of the factors underlying the growing punitiveness of the Canadian public, such as the aging of the population, rising crime rates, and economic recession, are resistant if not impenetrable to change; however, public acceptance of community-based noncustodial alternatives to imprisonment can be enhanced by an effective strategy of public education and social action. Public education should promote the acceptance and value of diversity in the population, so that previously condemned behaviors that cause no harm to others will be tolerated. Information programs should also attack the public's stereotype of the criminal as a dangerous, relentless predator with an abnormal psychological condition. The public should be informed that only a small percentage of offenders fit such a stereotype. Further, the public should be made aware that the risk of criminal victimization in Canada is still small and that imprisonment of offenders is not a cost-effective way of dealing with crime and criminals in general. The public should also be encouraged to assume responsibility for integrating the offender into the community. Providing victim services can also help reduce the outrage citizens feel at the harm inflicted by offenders. Public support of noncustodial alternatives to imprisonment depends to a large extent upon how such programs are presented to the public. They should be sold to the public on the basis of their cost-saving merits (compared to imprisonment) rather than their ideological content, since their rehabilitative value has been overblown at the expense of credibility. Fifteen references are listed.