Lecture 9 - Sentencing Flashcards
The aims of sentencing?
- Public protection
- Proportionality and justice
- Reparation and making amends
- The reduction of further offending and reoffending
What percent of court sentences result in prison time vs a fine?
- Prison time - 17%
- Fine - 63%
The four tenets of ‘reductivism’
- Deterrence
- Incapacitation
- Rehabilitation
- Retribution
Deterrence
- Punishment designed to turn people alway from offending.
- History suggests that deterrence alone is not
enough to eradicate or even lessen offending (Linebaugh, 1991)
Incapacitation
- Physical restriction and / or confinement which removes the offender from society or targets their ability to offend.
Rehabilitation
- A reforming process which attempts to repair individuals to ‘normalcy’.
- The identification and treatment of individual social
traits, such as the identification of a lack of
socialisation or lack of education, behavioural traits, such as the identification of
biological factors or abnormal psychology. - Financial cost
Retribution
- Every generic offence should receive identical and certain severe punishment as response e.g. ‘all thieves will have their hands cut off!..’
- Punishment in this case provides both means and end
- New Retributionism (Pratt, 2000; Hudson, 2003)
Packer, 1964, two models of the criminal justice system.
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Bifurcation - over the past 50 years, criminal justice legislation in England and Wales has attempted proportionate sentencing or
‘bifurcation’ the matching of punishment to offence (Hobbs and Hamerton, 2014)
Sentencing policy as political tool - into the 1990s
Criminal Justice Act 1991
- Minor offences – fine or discharge
- More serious – community sentence
- Serious – custodial sentence
Criminal Justice Act 1993
- ‘Getting tough’ and ‘Prison Works’ (Michael Howard, 1993)
- Previous convictions should be taken into account
Crime (Sentences) Act 1997
- Severe sentences for recidivists
Sentencing policy as political tool – into the 2000s
The Auld and Halliday Reports in 2001 suggested focusing on stopping repeat offenders through punishment, rehabilitation, and protecting the public.
The Criminal Justice Act 2003 followed this by clearly setting out the goals of sentencing and introduced special sentences like IPP for dangerous offenders, based on how serious or risky their crimes were.
Criminal Justice Act (2003) –
sentencing and seriousness
The court should decide on the sentence and its duration
via reference to:
- The seriousness of the offence – aggravating and
mitigating factors
- The circumstances of the Defendant – character, previous convictions and personal circumstances
- The pre-sentence reports – to assess risk factors and
personal problems etc.
Sentencing policy and practice – the last decade
The Con-Lib Coalition Government (2010-2015) saw
the prison budget as unsustainable and introduced a sentencing reform framework, including:
- The increased involvement of Neighbourhood Justice Panels in sentencing minor offenders (MoJ, 2010)
- Increased ‘multi-agency’ working to supervise
serious offenders in the community (MoJ, 2010)
The Sentencing Act 2020
The Sentencing Act 2020 brought together all the main sentencing laws into one clear guide called the Sentencing Code, to help judges apply the law more easily and avoid mistakes. It covers both adult and youth sentencing and aims to make the process more transparent for the public, though it doesn’t deal with release or recall rules and is still being updated.
