Offenders may be sentenced to prison according to the seriousness and severity of crime. The age old custodial measure and institutional incarceration presents some crucial problems, namely, it increases the dependence of offender and at the same time decreases his capacity to readjust to normal society after release.
Conformity with the strict prison discipline is no guarantee that the prisoner has really transformed into a law abiding citizen. Other inevitable consequences that arise from prisonisation of offender are loss of job, separation from family and contamination due to association with other professional delinquents.
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With the incarceration of the offenders, the real sufferers are his family members and dependents and they will be thrown into streets. In addition the over-crowdiness of prisons creates many more problems to the administrators and the State.
Some reformative treatment measures and non-institutional methods of dealing with corrigible offenders have been propagated to enable the delinquent to maintain contact with his family and other social agencies. Unlike imprisonment, the measures make the offender independent and leave him responsible for self-support.
These reformative measures enable the offenders to keep themselves away from criminogenic associations of prison and earn their living rather than leading an idle and wasteful life. They should not remain a burden on their family or society because they can earn their living themselves.
The reformative measures are intended to adjust the offenders themselves to normal society and thus avoiding isolated and dull life in the prison. Some non-institutional and institutional reformative treatment measures are (i) release on probation; (ii) furlough; (iii) parole, etc.