Sentencing: A Social Process

Cyrus Tata is Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at Strathclyde University, Scotland, UK.

This book asks how we should make sense of sentencing when, despite huge efforts world-wide to analyse, critique and reform it, it remains an enigma.Sentencing: A Social Process reveals how both research and policy-thinking about sentencing are confined by a paradigm that presumes autonomous individualism, projecting an artificial image of sentencing practices and policy potential. By conceiving of sentencing instead as a social process, the book advances new policy and research agendas.  Sentencing: A Social Process proposes innovative solutions to classic conundrums, including: rules versus discretion; aggravating versus mitigating factors; individualisation versus consistency; punishment versus rehabilitation; efficient technologies versus the quality of justice; and ways of reducing imprisonment. 

1. Unravelling the Enigma of Sentencing Decision-Making.- 2. Sentencing Research and Policy: Presumed Autonomous Individualism.- 3. The Social Production of Sentencing.- 4. Reproducing Autonomous Individualism: the Work of the Sentencing Professions.- 5. Individualising and Normalising: The Humanising Work of the Sentencing Professions.- 6. The Rise of Technology and the Demise of the Sentencing Professions?.- 7. New Directions for Research and Policy.