In a penal system with utilitarian/reductivist/consequentialist goals, there could be clashes between, for example, protection or deterrence, and reform of individuals. It may be thought that deterring potential offenders and protecting the public from crime requires long prison sentences, whereas reforming the actual offender may be better served by community penalties such as probation. This argument is often heard between the advocates of increased and decreased prison use, the former claiming that 'prison works' and the latter maintaining that 'prison does not work'. What the 'more imprisonment5 lobby claims is that prison works to keep people who might commit more offences off the streets, and that it might put some people off the idea of committing crime; the 'reduce imprison¬ment' lobby claims that prison is not generally successful in making people who have been sent there into better, more law-abiding citizens. The argu¬ment is not really about the effectiveness of imprisonment as such, but about the relative priority which should be accorded to deterrence, protec¬tion or reform.