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Bzzzzzzzzzzzt! Wrong answer. I've a number of friends from the wrong side of the tracks, all of which are more or less always in trouble with the law. It's not uncommon for the majority of the sentence to be suspended, regardless of the fact that the jail time is "mandatory". Go sit in a court room some time.
In Australia we had a big "Truth in Sentencing" reform several years back. I'm not intimately aquainted with all the details, so corrections are welcome, but it goes something like this:
The judges and prison officials got together to look at how much time prisoners *actually* served for many many different types of offenses... even catogorising by circumstances within types of offenses.
The judges then started sentencing according to the *actual* average time prisoners had really done, in the past. In many cases, though not all, prison sentences dropped to a quarter of their former length, which was a bit of a shock to a lot of people, especially the families of victims. There are also a lot more community service sentences going around.
However, if you got a sentence, you could expect to serve all of it. No ifs, no buts. You could still get early release for good behaviour, but it is something like no more than about 10% of your sentence, knocked off the end.
If jail makes you suicidal, you get sent to prison hospital and get pysch treatment. You serve all your time there if you keep presenting symptoms.
The judges still lock you up and throw away the key for particualy premeditated, greedy, selfish or heinous crimes against people. So there are still plenty of career criminals, murderers, rapists and drug lords with effective life sentences. There are just less criminals with effective life sentences than there used to be.
Edited, Jun 7th 2007 11:12pm by Aripyanfar
