Birmingham: If you were travelling through various parts of the southern United States or Australia during the 19th or early 20th centuries you might occasionally have seen gangs of men out at work, hoeing fields or laying down railway tracks, under the watch of a nearby overseer. A closer inspection might reveal them to be wearing distinctive clothes, such as striped or orange jumpsuits, and that their heads had been shaved to mark them out as offenders undergoing punishment. Sometimes they would have been linked together by a single long chain passing through manacles worn around their ankles, a practice which gave them the popular names ‘irons gang’ or ‘chain gang’. The fact that this took place in public, and in conditions designed to drive home that the offenders were to be treated with contempt, was part of the point. Members of the public could be brutal in their behaviour towards such offenders; verbal abuse, or even attacking them with thrown objects, could pose as much of a danger as the overseer or the work itself. By the 1950s the practice had largely disappeared, though not entirely – well into the 1990s and even the 2010s some jurisdictions in the USA continued to use them to ‘send a message’ about the potential costs of criminal action.
And now, apparently, our Justice Secretary, Robert Buckland, thinks that reintroducing some of that ethos into how we oversee community offences would be quite a good idea. In England and Wales one of the stated purposes of sentencing offenders (per Part 12 Chapter 1 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003) is the reduction of crime, including by deterrence, but also the making of reparation by offenders to those affected by their offences, and the reform and rehabilitation of offenders. Even if you confined yourself to the first of these points, a glance at the evidence would show you that there is no relation between the public shaming of offenders and the reduction of crime.
Read more: Timothy Kiely, Law Gazette: https://is.gd/cBWuxp
