Text 18. The price of crime

What sort of sentences can you receive if you are found guilty? The English system gives the magistrate or the judge a lot of freedom in deciding on the sentence, depending on the exact circumstances of the crime and criminal; for example, is it your first offence, did you really understand what you were doing, are you a danger to society? About 90% of all crimes are dealt with by magistrate’s courts. Magistrate’s courts can impose fines of up to £2,000 or prison sentences of up to 6 months. If the punishment is to be more severe the case must go to a Crown Court. The most severe punishment is life imprisonment: there has been no death penalty in Britain since 1965.

The lightest sentence possible is community service. This means that you do unpaid work for a fixed number of hours (between 40 and 240), on jobs such as painting hospital buildings or gardening for elderly people.

You can be put on probation for a certain period of time. You have to visit your probation officer every week, and keep out of trouble. There can be other conditions; for example, you have to accept treatment for drug addiction.

You may have to pay a fine. For smaller things like driving offences, the fines are usually fixed amounts – perhaps £40 for parking in the wrong place.

But fines can be used for serious crimes if prison is not appropriate – for example, when a company breaks the law. Then the fine depends on ability to pay: rich people or organizations sometimes pay millions of pounds.

The standard punishment for serious offences is prison. You will probably go to prison if you commit burglary (breaking into houses and stealing things), robbery (stealing with force or violence), rape or murder. For criminals between the ages 15 and 20, there are special young offenders’ institutions.

Many people feel that criminals should go to prison, but it is far from the perfect answer to the problem. When prisoners are released, they often carry on with their lives of crime; in fact, they meet other criminals inside, get ideas from them, and make useful contacts. There is quite a lot of drug abuse and violence in English prisons. And it is an extremely expensive system.

A useful alternative to a prison sentence is a suspended sentence. You remain free for a certain period, and if you behave well, you will never have to serve your sentence. But if you commit another crime in the fixed period, your suspended sentence is added to your new one. An example would be one year in prison, suspended for two years.

Unit 9 text 19. The diversity of police activities

There is a remarkable historical, geographical, and organizational diversity in the activities of police. Within any one country the work of police today is very different from what it was 200 years ago. There are also major differences between countries – policing New York City has little in common with policing the Solomon Islands. The diversity is so great that the onlooker may wonder if the different kind of activity and organization have sufficient in common to be classified together.

The principle of police accountability is helpful in explaining the diversity. From one point of view, it is desirable that a police force be as efficient as possible. This consideration favours the establishment of national police forces, which can take advantage of the economies of scale in training, promotion, organization, and so on. But it often has been felt that the existence of a national force places too much power in the hands of those who direct it; that there is a danger that the government will use its control of the police to keep itself in office; and that the police will not be accountable to the public. Therefore, some countries favour a local basis for police organization.

A second principle that helps explain the diversity of police activities in different societies is that of police adaptation to cultural traditions. If the society is agricultural, as in rural India, the police will be concerned with the state of the crops, the irrigation of fields, the conditions of roads and paths, the registration of births and deaths, feasts, fairs, and all manner of private and public events. If local landowners are influential, as they were in the 19^th century in England, much police effort will be expended in the enforcement of laws against poaching and much less in the investigation of ways in which the behaviour of employers infringes the rights of employees. If some offences are committed by criminals using vehicles, the police must be partially motorized. If criminals use firearms, the police are likely to be armed. Police activity must be adapted to the society that is being policed.