Alternative Punishments and their Roles in Improving Socio-Economical and Political Aspects in Tanzania

Abstract

“The criminal sanction is the best available device we have for dealing with gross and immediate harm and threats of harm. It becomes less useful as the harms become less gross and immediate. It becomes largely inefficacious when it is used to enforce morality rather than to deal with conduct that is general seen as harmful.” It is rebuttable fact that, the use of community services, probation, parole, extra-mural labour, open air camps and other means of punishing criminals allows the government reducing much costs in development programmes as well as allowing those criminals or prisoners contributing directly in maintenance of their dependants, taxpaying liabilities and income productions to rise up the revenue and their personal income. It allows also those criminals to learn good social values of their societies, so as to become good citizens of such societies. To some countries except Tanzania, those criminals they also have the right to vote or participating in any political election. Hence serving punishment other than imprisonment may allow them to active participate in some of political movements, such as voting. In Tanzania a person is not qualified to be voted or vote or appointed in any political position if such person is serving sentence of imprisonment of more than 6 months or death penalty. For many years passed criminal laws on punishments were based on deterring, restituting, revenging against them on the basis that “who commit an offence should suffer the same” from committing offences once again without considering the socio-economic and political impacts of those sanctions. Now it has reached the time where societies started to look upon those impacts resulting from imprisonment and tried to come up with various mechanisms to resolve such problems resulting from imprisonment as the means of punishing offenders whereby alternative punishments had been introduced; this aims at examining the contributions of those alternative punishments in promoting socio-economic and political development. This paper aims at tracing and analyzing the effectiveness of alternative punishments in engineering socio-economical and political development in the society in Tanzania, by looking to a number of legislations which provides for the same.