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What Is the Impact of Probation on Satisfying the Public’s Desire for Justice or Punishment?

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Abstract

In the Netherlands in 2007, a television documentary alleged that community sanctions were being used for very serious crimes such as homicide and rape. There was an extremely negative public response. An academic study showed that the actual behaviour involved in the ‘very serious crimes’ was much less serious than their label might have suggested, and that a period in prison had in most cases been imposed alongside the community supervision. But as a result, recidivists and serious cases were excluded from community sanctions and the assumed lack of public acceptance of them has resulted in continued efforts to stress their punitive nature (Boon and van Swaaningen 2013, p. 18).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The phrase was used in regard to sentencing in Halliday (2001), p. ii.

  2. 2.

    Recommendation CM/Rec(2010)1 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on the Council of Europe Probation Rules (Adopted by the Committee of Ministers on 20 January 2010 at the 1075th meeting of the Ministers’ Deputies).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Justice and Prisons, London, UK

    Rob Allen

Authors
  1. Rob Allen
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow School of Social and Political Sciences, Glasgow, United Kingdom

    Fergus McNeill

  2. Faculty of Sociology, University of Bucharest Faculty of Sociology, Bucharest, Romania

    Ioan Durnescu

  3. HU University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands, UTRECHT, The Netherlands

    René Butter

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Allen, R. (2016). What Is the Impact of Probation on Satisfying the Public’s Desire for Justice or Punishment?. In: McNeill, F., Durnescu, I., Butter, R. (eds) Probation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51982-5_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51982-5_8

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