By Tess Bartlett - Rethinking Crime and Punishment

The time would seem to be appropriate to consider whether othermethods could not be adopted, and to question whether there are notin prison many men who should not be held in penal institutions.(Department of Justice, 1957: 11)Accordingly, this report highlighted that imprisonment should only be used forserious offenders (Department of Justice, 1957). While the report still adopted penalwelfare attributes, noting that alternative measures of treatment should be soughtwherever possible, it does not specify how this should be dealt with.By 1965 penal discourse had shifted once more. The 1965 Annual Report of theDepartment of Justice (1965: 5) notes that the persistent offender is a main priority‘against whom none of the existing measures of the criminal law has been, or islikely to be, of any avail’. This suggests that those attributes associated with penal­welfarism had done little to tackle the problem of the recidivist offender. It wasbeginning to be recognised that the commitment to treatment and rehabilitation wasnot going to solve all crime problems.(b) The ‘Report of the Penal Policy Review Committee’The commitment shown to penal­welfarism during the early post­war years did littleto reduce crime or the continued rise in imprisonment. This resulted in the decline offaith in penal­welfarism from the 1970s, as policymakers sought new ways ofresponding to crime. Hence, the suggestion by the Department of Justice (1980) thata review of penal policy take place. Following this, in 1981, the second pivotaldocument to have a profound influence on penal policy development emerged. The‘Report of the Penal Policy Review Committee’ (1981b: 39) continued to regard thereduction in the prison population as the top priority where the aim was ‘to considerthe means by which the incidence of imprisonment can be reduced to the greatestdegree …’. The means by which the reduction took place, however, provided acomplete contrast to the objectives set out in the 1954 report (Department of Justice,1954). The Penal Policy Review Committee (hereafter referred to as the Committee)argued that policy up until the 1980s had been inconsistent, with conflictingobjectives, and this had ‘bred some degree of uncertainty and confusion’ betweenthose implementing, administrating and imposing penal sanctions (Penal PolicyReview Committee, 1981a: 4). The Committee held the belief that this uncertainty27