The Problems of Mandatory Sentencing

In a recent article on the ABC News website Barry O’Farrell proposed the introduction of a mandatory life sentence for those found guilty of murdering a police officer.  This raises two important questions; what is the political motivation for doing this, and does it have any intelligent criminological grounding?

First we’ll address the political issues. It contrast to previous elections of the past two decades, in the recent NSW State Election law and order issues took a backseat. The only specific policies promised, beyond the very generic catch cry of more funding, more police, tougher police and the like, were anti-Bikie legislation and increased funding of police technologies.  However history will show that this is very likely a one off, and that the next election will likely strongly involve a battle of law and order policy. Thus, it seems logical that Barry O’Farrell would want to seem ‘tough on crime’. If this is all he was hoping to achieve from the issue, then he has done so very intelligently; this one action has at once painted him as a leader who is willing to act, who is tough on crime (due to the public perception that jail time is a direct correlate of toughness on crime), and has painted a picture of the police as some special force within the community. At this point, I thought that surely there was a more direct cause for this legislation than what has already been identified, but I was unable to locate any particularly high profile police as victims of murder cases; in fact, even within the ABC News article, the victim they discussed has been deceased for over 14 years. 

Now I will discuss the criminological perspective. Firstly, in the article they quote Former NSW Director of Public Prosecutions Nicholas Cowdery as saying, "The difficulty about mandatory sentences is that you remove the discretion of the courts to do justice in a particular case, cases are not black and white… It's for courts and judges once they hear all the evidence to make an appropriate determination, not for parliamentarians in a knee jerk law and order auction." Now whilst I do not necessarily agree with the notion of it being a knee jerk law and order auction (on the contrary, I feel it is highly planned, though purely political manoeuvre), I do agree, contrary to the common vernacular, that the move away from discretion is not a good thing. Why? Because it is a move backwards in terms of the way we view crime. A large body of research into the nature of punishment has shown that contrary to public perceptions that toughness, in both sentencing and punishment, reduces recidivism, it is the therapeutic restorative practices, that involve high levels of discretion and interaction, that are most successful in healing the wounds of victims and offenders alike. As posited by McCold and Wachtel (2003), a criminal justice system that merely doles out punishment to offenders and sidelines victims does not address the emotional or relational needs of those who have been affected by crime in a world where people are increasingly alienated. As Henry (1999) would say, the type of logic being used by Barry O’Farrell is an attempt to solve 21^st century problems with 19^th century logic.

So in conclusion, I guess it is best to say that Barry O’Farrell is a good politician (in the sense that he is good at his job as a politician), and that he is an inherently illogical policy maker.

Cop Killers: Is it just to sentence without knowing the detail?

References:

ABC News. 2011. NSW proposes mandatory life term for cop killers. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/22/3223632.htm. [Accessed 01 June 11].

McCold, P., & Wachtel, T. (2003). In Pursuit of Paradigm; A theory of Restorative Justice. World Congress of Criminology, N/A.

Henry, J.F. (1999). Lawyers as agents of change. Into the 21^st Century: Thought pieces on Lawyering, Problem Solving and ADR, Vol. 51.