To what extent should an offenders background be taken into consideration when sentencing?

Sigh. You have no idea what a Marxist is, never mind what our playbook is. Plenty of people have awful or poor backgrounds and experiences and don't go on to offend. No actual Marxist would ever say that people should not take personal responsibility - quite the contrary. Without a doubt experience can inform the way that someone thinks and develops as a person, but it isn't just one aspect of their life forms character, and there is always the opportunity to make personal choices.

If you want to know what Marxists actually think, try looking up lumpen proletariat. People can be born into the lumpen proletariat, but staying there is still a choice, even if they haven't thought about making that choice. Individual agency always trumps circumstances - people can do and rise above their circumstances.

Having worked in youth offending, I agree.

20 years ago youth justice was mostly joy-riders and shoplifters with the occasional serious crime. Now it's mostly serious crime as the joy-riders and shoplifters are diverted away from the system and dealt with out of court.

I saw extreme offenders given chance after chance because of workers belief in 'trauma-informed practice' which absolutely has it's place but only if you're actually DOING SOMETHING to address the trauma. if you're just not expecting them to comply with their order or taking them out to Mcdonalds as a reward for even occasionally turning up because they've had a shit life, it doesn;t help a thing.

I've known children come into the system after numerous offences that were dealt with out of court saying they're quite happy to be on a youth offending order because their brother/sister/mate was and got taken out for food and nice activities all the time.

They wouldn;t turn up for the mandatory panels, reparation or whatever because they saw it as a waste of their time and if there was no reward like food or bowling, why would they?

I saw really dangerous children/adolescents not be breached on their orders because the worker didn;t want to effect their relationship with them and the youths relationship with the criminal justice system. Which put the public at risk. And often, the child was at risk from exploiters or gang violence that none of the authorities could or were, protecting them from.

As i said in a previous post, i think the tide is turning now and youth offending teams are being much more prescriptive and strict.

All of the examples you give are very real - I can think of a person who would fit the descriptor in almost every case.

In terms of sentencing, the purpose of guidelines is to allow differing circumstances to be taken into account and broadly that seems right to me. There has to be justice for victims but the idea that a long prison sentence, rather than an appropriate sentence - which might include mental or health or substance use treatment, or restorative justice or reparation - is always ‘justice’ is a problem imo. Background is more than just childhood. Punishing someone who commits crime to feed addiction doesn’t solve the root cause. We don’t have enough leeway or imagination in sentencing, and the way it’s reported is designed to upset people. A community sentence, that might include aforementioned requirements as well as unpaid work or a fine or a behavioural course, are seen as ‘walking free’.

"Abused as a child and then commit a similar offence? IMO makes no difference to the harm inflicted on a victim...Sentencing should focus on the harm inflicted or intended on victims. The background of the offender is far less important."

Obviously everyone is different and will process things differently but speaking from personal experience, understanding the background of the perpetrator of the crime committed against me actually helped me understand how they'd got to that point in their life and how that affected me. It made them feel less scary and humanised them which took some of the power away. It definitely helped me to process it. The other impact to be honest I don't think any harsher sentencing would have helped because the impact on me would still have been the same irregardless and I would still have been dealing with the same fallout irregardless. I'd much rather know that that person was addressing their issues and would be better in future. That's just my individual experience though.

I think it's also important to consider addiction as a type of mental illness though. The person who did that needs serious intervention work to address their addiction which is complex and actually best done in the community in most cases. Otherwise they go to prison, come out into the same situation and reoffend anyway. Plus the impact of a prison sentence on things like getting a job or stable accommodation - both of which are closely linked to maintaining sobriety which is ultimately what's needed to stop that person from driving under the influence. Plus there's the other risk where they come out, use again but their tolerance has dropped and they overdose. I've worked with a number of young people who have died because of this.

I think it depends on what you're looking for - you can't lock them up forever unless you're looking at a crime like serial murder so ultimately they need to be able to be in society safely so that should really be the goal rather than simply a lengthy prison stint.

But then in the UK the age of criminal culpability is one of the lowest worldwide at only 11. So actually we're harshest on our children and young people in our justice system.

As fas as I remember, one of the panel expressed the view raised in your last sentence, ie since a difficult background predisposes people to commit crime, we need to protect society from them.

A good point, and difficult to disagree with, but it might be better to try to 'fix' them as oart if their sentence.

So the public don’t need to be protected from fraud, theft , embezzlement, blackmail ?

Not at all.

No, totally agree with that. Rehabilitation is an important element in managing offenders but really, you cannot sentence less to deal with the difficulties in someone’s background. The chances are that it makes less responsible or more dangerous in some cases. It’s very tough, but by the time you are facing custody, you can’t really say your background is significant and means you get a lesser sentence. The reality is you’ve done something to harm someone.

I think the key is hierarchy of objectives. Top needs to be public safety. That means certain criminal actions, regardless of reason, need to trigger the perpetrator to be kept away from the public. Exactly what then happens with them could well be dictated by the reasons behind their crime, their own difficult background etc. But what you can't do is prioritise something like leveling the playing field so that difficult background equals more forgiveness, as that exposes the public to more risk and opens up a huge mess of chaos.

the hostels they were placed into sounded like open prisons really, so it was unreasonable to expect them not to reoffend. I’ll never forget the younger woman, she was like a 16 year old in a 30 year old body. She had to state that she knew she could get anxious going to shops and crossing the road…imagine your life just being halted and being placed into an alternate reality for years and years and then being expended to carry on and adjust to life outside. I wonder what she’s doing now.

I have been reading a book by Dr Duncan Harding called the Criminal Mind. He is a forensic psychiatrist mainly working with children and the book is absolutely fascinating. I will say as you might expect the book answers the question of involving kids in the criminal justice system with the level of nuance you might expect.

He is a big proponent of the criminal justice system being of particular importance to children who are exhibiting extreme violence instead of giving them endless chances to rehabilitate or excusing behaviours with trauma or no very hard evidence of a mental health condition because he thinks it gives the best chance for them to change.

I don’t really think it should be taken into account at all, because surely no one who has done any of the things you’ve named would have no history of adverse life experiences. None of us live in a bubble. Even the most functioning successful person will have some history of trauma or difficulty in life. I say this as a red flag waving lifelong Labour supporter. It doesn’t change the risk someone poses to society, if anything it likely exacerbates it.

Where such things are often accounted for in sentencing is when someone has done something “good” in the past or made a positive contribution to society. For example, I have a family member who was convicted and went to prison for sexually abusing his niece. Part of the sentencing involved the consideration that he had until then (50s), been an upstanding citizen with no prior convictions, was employed, and had been helping the niece’s family practically and financially during the time he was abusing her. Now me personally, I’d probably call some of that grooming 🤔 but apparently, it worked in his favour in sentencing.

Also, speaking as a sociologist, the use of the term “lived experience” isn’t really correct as it’s being used here. It’s probably more accurate to say life experiences or if we’re talking specifically about childhood, we might say adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).

Lived experience means more specifically having a life experience that informs your perspective on an issue. So like if you want to develop a policy on wheelchair use on the tube, you’d talk to engineers and tube drivers and tube users, including those who have lived experience of using a wheelchair. It’s similar, but a subtle difference. It would lead me to believe that whoever was speaking was either quite junior or didn’t really know what they were talking about and was trying to use a big term to sound smart instead of using the normal words all of us would use to talk about these things. Okay, I’m going to get off my soap box now. 😂

Honestly lived experience may be relevant to why an offender offends but it is rarely a basis for mitigation.

Being on drugs or being drunk gets you a longer sentence.

Abused as a child and then commit a similar offence? IMO makes no difference to the harm inflicted on a victim.

Lived experience does not usually affect someone’s understanding of right and wrong. Crime is an active choice, not an accident. Sentencing should focus on the harm inflicted or intended on victims. The background of the offender is far less important.

The one that made me lose my everloving shit was when a judge stated that an offender (it was multiple armed robbery) would be adversely affected if convicted because he came from a good background. . .

@ForTaupeBiscuit I watched it too! Appreciate this is totally derailing the thread, But what I found mostly fascinating was that nearly all of them had ended up breaching their conditions and ultimately returning to prison. A lot of it did have to do with the environment they were released into - The conditions would be that they stay in the shelter (Can’t remember the specific name). But when the offender clearly tells you that drink and drugs make them offend, it’s unreasonable to then release them To a place they share with other alcoholics and drug users and then expect them to be on the straight and narrow and avoid temptation IMO

I watched Parole on BBC a while ago and it was so interesting, they were dealing with mostly complex cases with serial repeat offenders, some of whom committed multiple serious crimes including murder. What struck me was you sort of knew who was going to get parole and who wasn’t not so much based on the nature of the crime, but really how they came across and how they were reported to be by prison staff. Some were clearly only going to re-offend, others had a chance of not. Most came from awful backgrounds full of neglect and violence. Some were clearly psychopaths incapable of change. Others were clearly remorseful and wanting to live a better life.

Totally, but blue sky thinking - if we had all the available money and resources in the world it would be great to then try and diagnose those people during their sentence. If nothing found - ok bad apple. If you start drawing up correlations, then you can apply this to therapy whilst incarcerated to limit the risk of reoffending when released, and even further - to spot signs in younger life to avoid these traits turning in to offences.

There are numerous studies correlating many, many things when it comes to prison populations. And different studies may say different things.

Correlation doesn't mean causation.

The number of tobacco smokers for instance in UK prisons is about 4 times higher than the national average. We don;t think smoking causes crime.

There are potentially dozens of factors and you can;t target all of them. It's usually a combination of many factors in each individual.

And those combinations of factors are also seen in the general population who are not offenders.

Fraud, burglary thieving, etc are non violent crimes and the public absolutely do need to be protected from those who commit these crimes.
And imprisonment is often the punishment given for these types of crimes when their perpetrators did not learn from prior non incarceration punishment.
Thus proving themselves a menace to a society which suffers the after affects of such criminality.
Increased prices in shops due to the need for more security and fraud prevention systems, increased insurance in places of high criminality, another knock on effect being the poorer who usually live in these areas in high numbers find it increasingly harder to afford goods and insurance for the little that they can buy.

I see your point.

But "something being wrong is someones brain" is a completely subjective opinion. And often has nothing to do with any diagnosable condition.

Everyone has their own opinions on morality and crime. Crime IS a social construct.

You'll see numerous threads on MN even where violence is considered a completely valid response to certain situations. Same with murder. There are millions of people in the world who think murder is entirely justified in certain situations.

As for rape, the statistics demonstrate that many people have different definitions of rape that don;t always correlate with how it's seen in law.

It is an estimated that 50-60% of prisoners in the UK are functionally illiterate. Therefore poor education resulting from poor parenting must be a factor.

There have been some studies on serial killers (appreciate this is a tad different to your scenario) but they did neurological tests that found a commonality. The receptors responsible for empathy didn’t function the same way that they do in neurotypical humans and some even claim that these could have been ‘turned off’ as a result of long term childhood abuse. I am not a scientist though,
so cannot be quoted here!

Related to this- are some people just more inclined to be evil, and then having a difficult upbringing is more like to bring out their criminality? I have personal experience of this- some trauma in my upbringing, my sibling also had trauma. I live a law abiding life and have moved on from this trauma. My sibling is an abusive and violent person whi enjoys power and control over others. My sibling blames our upbringing for much of this behaviour. I think there is something evil that was triggered in my sibling and would not want current abusive behaviour to be explained away by past trauma. Based on this scenario I would want the full force of the law to be applied.