[jambutty]

Originally Posted by accymel

Longer sentence for unemployed call


Unemployed criminals should be given longer community service sentences because they are less busy, the head of an influential MPs' committee has said.

Punishments that take up time are proportionately worse for offenders who have a job or care for a family, according to John Denham.
The chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee said sentences should have a "broadly equal impact on people" and the effect of community service was "clearly much heavier on someone who is already busy than someone who isn't".
He told the BBC: "If someone has more time on their hands, perhaps if they are unemployed but not necessarily, the length of their sentence should be longer."
He added: "Giving different offenders the same length of community sentence is superficially equal, but in reality it isn't."
Mr Denham, a former home office minister, insisted his proposal could help reduce overcrowding in prisons by bolstering confidence in community sentences.
Higher earners can already be subjected to higher fines than lower earners. Mr Denham also suggested that offenders should wear uniforms while carrying out community service, and that attendance centres should be used more to demonstrate publicly that "offenders are being deprived of some of their liberty".

Longer sentence for unemployed call - Yahoo! News UK

Will it work mmmm oh well lets all get a job & do crime I think they are grasping at straws here

Eh!

The punishment for a particular crime should be the same whether the person is unemployed or earning an obscene salary. The only exception being punishment by way of a fine.

The fine should be related to the person’s weekly income. It is a fat load of good fining someone £1,000 when they are on the dole. It will only encourage some people to turn to crime to pay the fine or more likely not bother to pay at all. Their punishment will go on for months and maybe even years whereas someone earning a good wage would pay off the fine in one and its done and dusted.

I would try and determine how much a person can afford to pay each week and multiply that by a suitable time period to arrive at the amount of the fine. Thus an unemployed person might be deemed to be able to afford a weekly payment of £5 and the crime warranted a fine spread over 10 weeks making his fine £50. But for a wealthy person might be able to afford $100 per week and his fine would be £1,000.

Unfair? Not really because in both cases both people are being made to suffer for the same period of time.