The focus of the criminal justice system in Canada and all around the world for hundreds of years has been retributive justice. One of the main ideas has been you do the crime, you do the time. Thus, all of our prisons were beginning to fill up and exceed their capacity. This was a result of basically everyone who was found guilty of committing an offence under the criminal code, was sentenced to time in jail or prison. Therefore, "during the 1980's and early 1990's, like many countries, Canada experienced significant prison population growth"(Bonta, Wallace-Capretta & Rooney, 1999: pg.4). This was due to the fact that our prisons were becoming greatly overpopulated and the cost to incarcerate an offender is quite expensive. As a result of this, governments around the world have been seeking ways that they can manage or reduce the prison populations. Hence, governments have been working at developing programs that would allow people who have been convicted of committing a criminal offence to serve their sentence outside of the jail walls. However, by doing this they still had to make sure that they were meeting the needs of the community by allowing them to feel safe and secure while these offenders were serving their sentence in the community. In addition, they still had to address the issues of sentences still being a form of punishment and deterrence for convicted offenders.
             Thus, during the late 1980's and early 1990's governments developed what is known today as community based sentence orders. These community based sentence orders would allow offenders to serve their sentence in the community. There were different levels of severity that each community sentence order had like community service hours being one of the least restrictive measures to electronic monitoring which is the most restrictive community based sentence that an offender can be placed on. Other community based senten...