This volume explores the theory and practice of sentencing in England and Wales, exploring issues such as the role of previous convictions, offender remorse and sentencing female offenders, as well as drawing upon a new and unique source of data from the Crown courts.

How do sentencing guidelines affect judicial practice? Can public opinion influence the development of these guidelines and what role does the victim have? How do barristers use the guidelines in practice? These questions and more are addressed in this volume examining the English sentencing guidelines and how they function.

Sentencing Policies and Practices in the 21st Century focuses on the evolution and consequences of sentencing policies and practices, with sentencing broadly defined to include plea bargaining, judicial and juror decision making, and alternatives to incarceration, including participation in problem-solving courts. This collection of essays and reports of original research explores how sentencing policies and practices, both in the United States and internationally, have evolved, explores important issues raised by guideline and non-guideline sentencing, and provides an overview of recent research on plea bargaining in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Other topics include the role of criminal history in sentencing, the past and future of capital punishment, strategies for reducing mass incarceration, problem-solving courts, and restorative justice practices. Each chapter summarizes what is known, identifies the gaps in the research, and discusses the theoretical, empirical, and policy implications of the research findings. The volume is grounded in current knowledge about the specific topics, but also presents new material that reflects the thinking of the leading minds in the field and that outlines a research agenda for the future. This is Volume 4 of the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Corrections and Sentencing handbook series. Previous volumes focused on risk assessment, disparities in punishment, and the consequences of punishment decisions. The handbooks provide a comprehensive overview of these topics for scholars, students, practitioners, and policymakers.

Alcohol is massively associated with crime. Evidence from the British Medical Association found that alcohol use is associated with 60-70 per cent of murders, 70 per cent of stabbings, 50 per cent of fights or assaults in the home. For non-violent offences the association is very strong as well: 88 per cent of those arrested for criminal damage, 83 per cent for breach of the peace, 41 per cent for theft and 26 per cent for burglary, had drunk in the four hours prior to their arrest. At the same time there has been intense concern about public drunkenness in town and city centres, especially on the part of young people, and the cost and damage this causes. This book seeks to understand the nature of the connection between alcohol and crime, and the way the criminal justice system responds to the problem, providing a clear and accessible account and analysis of the subject. It draws upon a wide range of sources and research findings, and also sets the subject within a broader comparative context. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, and includes a sociological account of the role of alcohol in British society, a criminological analysis of the link between alcohol and crime and a philosophical consideration of individual responsibility for harm caused whilst intoxicated, and a legal analysis of different approaches that can be adopted as a response to alcohol-related offending.

This innovative volume explores a fundamental issue in the field of sentencing: the factors which make a sentence more or less severe. All sentencing systems allow courts discretion to consider mitigating and aggravating factors, and many legislatures have placed a number of such factors on a statutory footing. Yet many questions remain regarding the theory and practice of mitigation and aggravation. Drawing on legal and sociological perspectives and examining mitigation and aggravation in various jurisdictions, the essays provide practical illustrations of specific factors as well as theoretical justifications. After the foreword by Andrew von Hirsch, a number of contributors address broad conceptual issues raised at sentencing. These contributions are followed by several empirical chapters including an exploration of personal mitigation in English courts. The authors are leading scholars from a range of common law jurisdictions including England and Wales, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

While guilty pleas are the primary mode of criminal case dispositions across different legal jurisdictions, this topic remains an understudied area. The assumption is that defendants are 'playing the system' and that a sliding scale of sentence discounts is necessary to encourage early guilty pleas, which offer utilitarian benefits of efficiency. These assumptions lack a solid empirical foundation. This book offers a comprehensive investigation of how the timing of guilty pleas affects various facets of the criminal process, from the factors that affect this timing, to the effects that the sliding scale of sentence discounts have on sentences and public opinions about them. It also draws comparisons between Western and Asian legal systems, specifically those of England and Wales and Hong Kong. This book is addressed to scholars, legal practitioners, policymakers and those interested in criminal justice, socio-legal studies and empirical legal research.

Sentencing Policies and Practices in Western Countries: Comparative and Cross-national Perspectives is the forty-fifth addition to the Crime and Justice series. Contributors include Thomas Weigend on criminal sentencing in Germany since 2000; Julian V. Roberts and Andrew Ashworth on the evolution of sentencing policy and practice in England and Wales from 2003 to 2015; Jacqueline Hodgson and Laurène Soubise on understanding the sentencing process in France; Anthony N. Doob and Cheryl Marie Webster on Canadian sentencing policy in the twenty-first century; Arie Freiberg on Australian sentencing policies and practices; Krzysztof Krajewski on sentencing in Poland; Alessandro Corda on Italian policies; Michael Tonry on American sentencing; and Tapio Lappi-Seppälä on penal policy and sentencing in the Nordic countries.

This study provides a critical examination of seminal issues within the main areas of criminal justice: its theoretical framework, domestic and comparative criminal justice, transnational and international criminal law. Exploring some of the most interesting challenges arising in these fields, it examines the impact of 'public morality' on sentencing policy, murder and the mandatory life sentence, genocide and the notion of magnitude and incitement to terrorism. Taking an approach that is fully integrated in contemporary criminal justice scholarship, it offers a diverse and expert perspective. With a comprehensive introduction and conclusion drawing the various strands together, it offers a rigorous, coherent overview of the key issues in play in contemporary international criminal justice. This diversity and expertise ensures its appeal to a large audience of students, scholars and practitioners of criminal justice around the world.

How do judges sentence? In particular, how important is judicial discretion in sentencing? Sentencing guidelines are often said to promote consistency, but is consistency in sentencing achievable or even desirable? Whilst the passing of a sentence is arguably the most public stage of the criminal justice process, there have been few attempts to examine judicial perceptions of, and attitudes towards, the sentencing process. Through interviews with Scottish judges and by presenting a comprehensive review and analysis of recent scholarship on sentencing – including a comparative study of UK, Irish and Commonwealth sentencing jurisprudence – this book explores these issues to present a systematic theory of sentencing. Through an integration of the concept of equity as particularised justice, the Aristotelian concept of phronesis (or 'practical wisdom'), the concept of value pluralism, and the focus of appellate courts throughout the Commonwealth on sentencing by way of 'instinctive synthesis', it is argued that judicial sentencing methodology is best viewed in terms of a phronetic synthesis of the relevant facts and circumstances of the particular case. The author concludes that sentencing is best conceptualised as a form of case-orientated, concrete and intuitive decision making; one that seeks individualisation through judicial recognition of the profoundly contextualised nature of the process.

This book presents an in-depth comparative study of sentencing practice for rape in six common law jurisdictions: England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. It provides a thorough review of the medical literature on the physical and psychological effects of rape, the legal and philosophical literature on the seriousness of the offence, and the victim's role in sentencing. Given the increasingly common practice of perpetrators using mobile and online technologies to film or photograph the commission of sexual offences, the book examines recent socio-legal research on technology-facilitated sexual violence and considers the implications for sentencing. By building on recent scholarship on judicial decision making in sentencing and case law – comprising over 250 decisions of the relevant appellate courts – the book explores and critically analyses judicial approaches to rape sentencing. The analysis is undertaken with a view to suggesting possible reforms to rape sentencing in 'non-guideline' jurisdictions. In so doing, this book seeks to establish general principles for sentencing rape, assisting in the imposition of proportionate sentences. This book will be of interest to judges and practising lawyers; to those researching criminal law, criminal justice, criminology, and gender studies; and to policy makers, including sentencing councils and commissions, in common law jurisdictions worldwide.