Looking for a new way towards life

Silvaster works in a gas station near La Brea, Los Angeles. This gas station is a place of regular police petrol from Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Most often, the petrol officer in charge send disguised employees into the store to see whether anyone is breaking the law or not.

That morning was started very badly for Silvaster. He sold a cigarette to a teenager, where selling cigarette or alcohol under 18 is illegal in California. That teenager in fact was a disguised police helper to catch the culprit red handed. Silvaster was being caught.  The most surprising thing was his punishment for committing the crime. He was punished to get admission in a middle school to learn about morals, values, rules and laws of a state and how to obey them as well.

Now, let's get back to our own country. In Bangladesh, we are still trying to punish criminals only by monetary penalty and imprisonment. More shockingly, the amount of monetary penalty is too low for the big criminals as well as petty offenders.

Why do a person involve in crime? In which circumstance, they get labeled as a criminals? What is the limitation of our correctional centers?  Our legal system lacks of proper research on it. The awareness and the importance of changing the “Punishment System and Sentencing Policy” in our country is not adequate. As a result, we are still standing behind the line of being civilized in a true manner.

We can stop illegal migration by providing sufficient work into the country. We can punish the white collar criminals by distributing their money to the social needs or needy families around us instead of making them white to black.

We can punish a dowry seeker by letting them earn a fixed amount of money within a fixed tenure through working as a construction labor to realise hardship of earning instead of begging dowry. We can punish a rapist and a murderer by sending them to a psychiatric because these kinds of criminals are not mentally normal at all. We can punish a juvenile offender by providing them a perfect place to live, healthy diet and proper education with their family too. We can punish an eve teaser by providing them religious knowledge on respecting women by their own religious preacher to open the eye of religious ignorance.

Moreover, we can implement the Swift, Certain, and Fair (SCF) approach to community supervision which reduces re-offending, arrest, and incarceration by delivering reliable sanctions to high-risk probationers, announced in advance in Hawaii.  Using community supervision is much more cost effective than a prison sentence or jail term, allowing for offenders to work and care for their families and pay taxes.  Community based supervision has the greatest impact on reducing crime, reducing re-offending, and incarceration.

“Punishment” should not be the word to practice in our sentencing policy. Because, no one is a born criminal at all and we should try to prevent crime because we can't keep full control on it.

If we have the opportunity to clean the dirty mind of a criminal through new sentencing policies instead of old British laws, then why shouldn't we go for that? The whole world is changing; criminals are changing their crime pattern too. So, this is our high time to impose new sentencing policies not new laws at all. If we are following the western culture to spoil our own tradition, then why not follow the good things happening over there like implementing innovative sentencing policies? Law is not a matter to be afraid off; in fact it should be the way to give a criminal a new life.

Adiba Fannana
Student of Master of Public Administration
California State University, USA.