Community-based sentencing

Optional conditions may also relate to victim interests if they are also reasonable and necessary “for securing the good conduct of the offender and for preventing a repetition by the offender of the same offence or the commission of other offences.”5 In an important respect, these conditions define the nature and severity of the sanction. [...] The Perspectives of Crime Victims 1.3 Importance of Promoting Victim Understanding and Acceptance of Sanction A number of conditional sentence judgments have referred to the importance of the views of the public with respect to the conditional sentencing regime.6. [...] This is accomplished, in part, through the rehabilitation of the offender, reparations to the victims and to the community, and the promotion of a sense of responsibility in the offender and acknowledgment of the harm done to victims and to the community. [...] Once again the judgment is sensitive to the nature of public reaction: if members of the public see the sentence as having an important impact on the life of the offender, they are more likely to accept the sanction as a substitute for a term of institutional imprisonment.8 The corollary of this proposition is that if the public believes the offender’s life has not been changed by the sentence, su [...] Specifically, we were interested in their perceptions of: • the concept of community sentencing; • the sentence imposed on the offender in their case; • the extent to which they had input into the sentence; • the nature of conditions imposed; • the adequacy of supervision of offenders serving sentences in the community; • the nature of the official response to breach of conditions.