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In 2017, the Sentencing Council introduced a revised guideline for plea-based sentence reductions. The revisions were designed to provide greater certainty and to accelerate the timing of guilty pleas. Late pleas resulting in ‘cracked trials’ have long been a problem in the court system. The guideline was not intended to change the rate of defendants who plead guilty, but rather to increase the percentage of pleas entered early in the criminal process. This brief article reports findings from an analysis of data from the Crown Court before and after the introduction of the revised sentencing guideline. Findings reveal that the overall guilty plea remained stable over the period 2014–2019. The guideline appears to have had no effect on the timing of guilty pleas entered, and in fact the percentage of ‘cracked’ trials rose in the post-guideline period.

Sleep curtailment and circadian misalignment disrupt energy sensing and eating behaviors, which can contribute to weight gain and obesity-related comorbidities. Herein, we review the effects of experimental manipulations of sleep duration and circadian alignment on circulating concentrations of appetite hormones, specifically leptin and ghrelin. Further, we focus on sex differences in hormonal and behavioral responses related to food intake. The studies reviewed suggest potential sex-specific effects of sleep curtailment on key hormones involved in the gut-brain axis, presumably leading to downstream effects on neural processes involved in food seeking and consumption behaviors. However, there is insufficient evidence to declare any sex-specific effects of circadian misalignment on appetite regulation. More research is needed to elucidate the complex sex-specific relationships between sleep, circadian rhythms, energy homeostasis, and appetite regulating mechanisms. Greater knowledge of these mechanisms would aid in the development of targeted methods to mitigate risk for obesity and related metabolic diseases.

To date, the literature on sentencing reform has largely focused on western jurisdictions, particularly the United States and Europe. Developments in other parts of the world, particularly on the African continent, have been overlooked. This article explores sentencing in a lesser-known African jurisdiction: Ethiopia. The focus of the essay is upon the issue of structured sentencing. Sentencing in Ethiopia, like most jurisdictions, has historically been a very discretionary stage of the criminal process. That has now changed with the introduction of a comprehensive guideline scheme. Although sentencing guidelines in the US and England and Wales have been the subject of much critical scrutiny, nonwestern guidelines have attracted very little attention from scholars. Although there are parallels between the structure of the Ethiopian system and guidelines in other countries, there are also important differences. Since they are more developed than guidelines in adjacent countries, the Ethiopian guidelines constitute a model for other regional nations, including those with a post-colonial legacy. After providing an overview of sentencing in Ethiopia, the article describes the origin, nature, and consequences of the Ethiopian guidelines. The guidelines provide sentence ranges for different levels of seriousness for many crimes, and also prescribe a methodology to guide courts sentencing for offences for which no such guidance exists. They also provide some structure for the judicial use of mitigating and aggravating factors at sentencing. We conclude by identifying some deficiencies of the current guidelines and propose some specific remedies.

Sentencing for multiple offences poses many challenges and becomes even more complex when the crimes resulted in fatalities. This article uses the sentences imposed following convictions in the Essex lorry case to pose some general questions about the sentencing of multiple victim manslaughters. The four principal offenders were convicted of 39 counts of unlawful act manslaughter and conspiracy to facilitate unlawful immigration into the UK. The analysis identifies several ways in which the sentences ultimately imposed failed to adequately distinguish between offenders of very different levels of culpability. First, all four principal offenders were assigned to the same level of culpability in the manslaughter guideline. Second, although the court could have distinguished the offenders to reflect their different culpability levels, the same Starting Point sentence was imposed on all offenders. Third, the sentencing uplifts to reflect the multiple counts were similar across offenders of very different culpabilities. Fourth, the differential additional punishments for the conspiracy conviction – which would have separated the offenders' time in custody further – were washed out by being made concurrent. As a result of these decisions, the final sentences failed to adequately distinguish between offenders of very different culpabilities. The article concludes with some lessons for sentencing in these cases, specifically with respect to the Sentencing Council's guidelines.

The scholarly literature on sentencing reform has largely overlooked Africa. The paucity of legal scholarship is particularly striking with respect to Tanzania, one of Africa's largest and most populous countries. This article explores the first significant sentencing reform in Tanzania's history. In 2020, the Tanzanian judiciary issued a comprehensive set of sentencing guidelines for courts to follow. Until this point, sentencing was a highly discretionary stage of the criminal process. Courts had wide discretion, and the Tanzanian penal code offered very little guidance with respect to the exercise of that discretion. After providing a brief summary of the sentencing regime, we explore the innovative guidance contained in the reforms. At the conclusion we discuss the extent to which the Tanzanian reforms reflect core African values of Ubuntu, or more specifically in the case of Tanzania, Ujamaa, the philosophy promoted by Tanzania's first President, Julius Nyerere.

How does the passage of time affect sentencing? Increasingly, courts around the world are being required to sentence offenders for crimes committed years or even decades earlier. Prevailing conceptions of harm and culpability change over time. Policy makers concerned with punishment and sentencing should be sensitive to changes in the absolute and relative seriousness of crimes as well as the absolute and relative severity of punishments. Ordinal rankings of offenses have evolved over the past 50 years, as has our understanding of the impact of various sanctions. Issues raised by sentencing for crimes committed much earlier illustrate the need for a time-sensitive approach. Should defendants be sentenced according to standards prevailing at the time of the offense or according to current standards? Courts in different jurisdictions have taken different positions on this question. Applying current standards amounts to retroactively re-calibrating the offender's culpability. This essay argues that offenders should be judged by the standards prevailing when they took the decision to offend. A time-sensitive approach would apply the sentencing standards of the earlier time, yet also consider time-relevant mitigation and aggravation in the period since commission of the offense. The offender's conduct and the victim's suffering during the period are both relevant factors. Although the emphasis in this essay is upon proportional sentencing, on any model the offence and the offender should never be treated as a moment in time, caught like an insect in amber. The passage of time often changes our evaluation of the offense and the offender, and when this occurs the nature of the sentence should change. The analysis also extends to long-serving prisoners, whose sentences should be reviewed after years have passed in case they are no longer deemed proportionate.

The consequences of a person’s prior crimes remain after the debt to society is paid and the sentence is discharged. While the practice of using prior convictions to enhance the severity of sentence imposed is universal, prior record enhancements (PREs) play a particularly important role in US sentencing, and especially in guidelines jurisdictions. In grid-based guidelines, criminal history constitutes one of the two dimensions of the grid. The enhancements are hard to justify. Retributive theories generally reject the use of robust, cumulative record-based enhancements. Research into recidivism suggests that the preventive benefits of PREs have been overstated. The public support the consideration of prior convictions at sentencing, but there is convincing evidence that people are less punitive in their views than are many US guideline schemes. PREs exacerbate racial disparities in prison admissions and populations, result in significant additional prison costs, undermine offense-based proportionality, and disrupt prison resource prioritization.

This chapter shows how powerful criminal history enhancements undermine important goals of guidelines reforms. First, these enhancements undermine the goal of making punishment severity proportional to the seriousness of the offense for which the offender is being sentenced; if prior record receives more weight in sentencing, conviction offense seriousness receives less weight. Second, these enhancements counteract the goal of reserving expensive prison beds for offenders convicted of violent crimes—powerful criminal history enhancements shift the balance of prison admissions and inmate stocks toward property, drug, and other nonviolent offenders. Third, prior record enhancements change the composition of prison populations by risk level—older offenders often have more prior convictions but declining recidivism risks, so criminal history enhancements increase the number of aging, low-risk prison inmates. The formulaic nature of such enhancements also over-predicts the risk level of some younger offenders. The chapter concludes with proposals for limiting these adverse effects.

This chapter shows how sentencing data can be used to quantify the substantial fiscal impacts of high-magnitude criminal history enhancements, overall and with respect to the problematic aspects of those enhancements identified and discussed in previous chapters. It uses data from Minnesota and several other states as examples because of the excellent sentencing data available for those states. The chapter first examines the total fiscal impact (added bed needs and costs) that results from the sentence-enhancing effects of criminal history on prison commitment and prison duration decisions. It then quantifies the fiscal impacts of the identified problematic aspects of prior record enhancements: disproportionately severe prison durations imposed on high history offenders, imprisonment of nonviolent offenders recommended for prison solely because of their elevated criminal history scores, imprisonment of aging offenders who are recommended for prison due to their high history scores, and racially disparate sentences that result from criminal history enhancements.

Sentencing policies routinely assign harsher sentences on repeat offenders, yet we know little about public attitudes toward recidivist sentencing premiums – beyond the predictable finding that people are more punitive when the offender is a recidivist. This article summarizes findings from a survey which explored public attitudes to prior record sentencing enhancements. The research addressed public reaction to two key inquiries (1) whether older priors should carry less weight at new sentencing hearings; and (2) whether juvenile priors should be counted at adult sentencing hearings. Many guidelines count all prior convictions forever, and juvenile priors are almost always included in the offender’s criminal history score. Are these practices consistent with community views? Results indicate that in contrast to current practice in the U.S. guidelines jurisdictions, the public significantly discounts older priors, and favor disregarding at least some juvenile priors. The policy consequences for sentencing commissions are discussed.

The English summer riots of 2011 resulted in the criminal justice system having to process an unprecedented number of offenders in a short timeframe. This study explores sentencing practice in the wake of the riots using the 2011 Crown Court Sentencing Survey. A multilevel model was implemented to specify the probability of receiving a custodial sentence for offences of commercial burglary. This model allows exploring differences in sentencing before and after the riots. An increased probability of receiving a custodial sentence in the post-riot period was identified. An increase in variability was also detected, changing from a state of almost perfect consistency to one in which substantial variation was observed between courts. Custodial rates for burglary increased to a level associated with more serious offences, thereby undermining the principle of proportionality. This, as well as the increased dispersion between courts, challenges other principles such as legal certainty and transparency.

Section 745.6 of the Criminal Code--colloquially known as the "faint hope" clause--permits most offenders sentenced to life imprisonment for murder or high treason, and who have to serve at least 15 years prior to becoming parole eligible, to have a jury review their parole eligibility dates. This includes all offenders convicted of first-degree murder and a small number of second-degree murder convictions (those with parole ineligibility periods in excess of 15 years). The "faint hope" clause is unique in the common law world; in other jurisdictions, parole eligibility is stipulated in statute, with the discretion to release prisoners vested in parole authorities. This provision is one of two ways in which community opinion may influence the sentencing of offenders convicted of murder in this country. (1) Juries have the power to make the applicant eligible for parole but the decision to grant or deny parole remains at the discretion of the National Parole Board. Section 745.6 has attracted controversy ever since the first application was heard in 1987. Calls for repeal or amendment grew more strident and more frequent following the unsuccessful application by Clifford Olson, and amendments to the provision were passed in 1997. Whatever their effect on the number and outcomes of applications under this provision, the amendments have failed to placate critics of judicial review. Whenever a high-profile individual (like Colin Thatcher) or any egregiously shocking case results in an application, headlines follow, and calls for repeal are renewed. In response, the federal government has recently introduced Bill C-36, which would repeal the provision with respect to offenders convicted of a murder committed on or after the day that the proposed legislation comes into force. (Bill C-36 received second reading on 18 June 2009.) For prisoners convicted of murder before this date, elements of the provision will be amended to make a successful outcome less likely. Other government proposals in the field of criminal justice will affect larger numbers of offenders and victims, but there are two reasons for examining C-36 in detail. First, it deals with one of the most publicly discussed provisions in the Criminal Code, and second, if passed without amendment, it may represent the first step towards more repressive amendments to the murder sentencing provisions. Some amendments to section 745.6 may be desirable. For example, there is no denying the trauma that 745.6 hearings cause crime victims, and one may question the wisdom of allowing applicants who have failed to secure any reduction in their parole ineligibility periods to make subsequent applications quite so expeditiously after the first application fails. If an application has failed to convince a jury on the basis of the prisoner's conduct after 15 years in prison, his case is unlikely to be much more convincing two years later. (2) Similarly, does it really make sense to allow a hearing in the case of a prisoner who has served 23 years of his 25 year sentence? One purpose of this brief article is to call for a thorough, comprehensive analysis of the way that provision has functioned over the past 20 years, (3) although the chances of an informed debate founded on an evidence-based review do not seem tbright. For example, when Daniel Petit moved that Bill C-36 be read the second time and referred to committee, he was asked how many people make an application and how many people actually succeed in an application, he was stumped for an answer, simply responding "No matter how many people are affected ... regardless of the number of people, it is a question of justice for the victims" (House of Commons Debates 12 June 2009 at 4565). The debate over this provision has become simplistic in tone--pitting prisoners' rights against victims' interests. It is yet another example of the false "zero-sum game" in which every proposal that appears to benefit offenders, must also, by definition, disadvantage victims (see Tonry forthcoming). …

Sentencing in England and Wales has evolved in a direction apart from other common law countries. Although sentencing problems found in many Western nations are present, legislative and judicial responses have been very different. The use of custody rose steeply in the 1990s and has remained stable around that level in recent years. Crimes of violence and sexual aggression have, however, attracted increasingly longer sentences. The other principal changes are a steep increase in indeterminate sentence offenders, now accounting for some 19 percent of the prison population, and a striking rise in the volume of suspended sentences that has reduced the use of community sentences rather than terms of imprisonment. Net widening has therefore occurred. The principal distinction between England and most other jurisdictions is that statutorily binding guidelines now exist for both magistrates’ and higher courts. Unlike most US guidelines that assign offenses to levels of seriousness within a single sentencing grid, the English guidelines are offense specific. The Sentencing Council has also issued “generic” guidelines applying to all categories of offending. The guidelines have been evolving for over a decade now and cover most common offenses. Growing, but still limited, research suggests modest positive effects on consistency and proportionality in sentencing.

Sentencing guideline schemes require courts to sentence within the guidelines - or give reasons why a different sentence is appropriate. Most US schemes require courts to find 'substantial and compelling' grounds for departing from the guidelines. The duty of a court with respect to sentencing guidelines in England and Wales changed significantly in 2010 as a result of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. This article explores the evolution of the duty of courts to comply with the English sentencing guidelines. As will be seen, the language of the duty of a court provision has become more robust: henceforth, courts 'must follow' definitive guidelines rather than merely 'have regard to' them. At the same time, the government significantly increased the range of sentence within which courts must sentence. The essay provides some international context, drawing upon experiences in the jurisdiction in which guidelines have been longest in existence, and explores the limited compliance statistics collected in England and Wales to date. The consequences of the latest changes for sentencing in England and Wales are discussed. © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

A considerable body of scholarship has explored the jury as a legal institution but community reaction to the institution and function of the jury has not, to date, been the subject of a review. The present article fills this void by addressing a number of important questions about public attitudes to the jury. The focus is upon public attitudes to the criminal jury in England and Wales, although limited comparisons are made with public opinion in other jurisdictions. The results demonstrate widespread support for, and confidence in, the criminal jury, both in this country and in other common law jurisdictions. The research record also demonstrates strong public opposition to proposals to restrict the right to trial by jury. There is some evidence, however, that support for the right to trial by jury may decline in the context of offenders charged with terrorism‐related offences.

Although miltefosine and paromomycin were registered as clinical agents against visceral leishmaniasis in the last decade, the antileishmanial drug arsenal still requires improvement, particularly in the area of oral antileishmanial drugs for both visceral and cutaneous diseases. Several new compounds and formulations have displayed promising efficacy in animal models of leishmaniasis, including the 8-aminoquinoline NPC1161, a series of bis-quinolines, DB766, rhodacyanine dyes, amiodarone, and an oral formulation of amphotericin B. Herein we provide a review of those molecules whose antileishmanial properties have been described over the past few years and a brief assessment of the studies required to identify new preclinical antileishmanial candidates.

This article present statistics on remand in custody in England and Wales. Currently, these statistics are spread across a wide range of government statistical publications, making it challenging to determine trends. We demonstrate that decisions to remand in custody are not a major contribution to prison overcrowding. However, it is important from perspectives both of human rights and economy to keep trends under close review, and to search for better ways of reducing the remand population in prisons. At the end of the article we review a number of strategies designed to reduce the remand population in this jurisdiction.

Patterns of suicide resilience vary considerably across ethnic groups and are an understudied dimension of suicide science. The purpose of the current study was to examine the relationship between cultural worldview and "reasons for living," an alternative index for suicide risk in a cross-cultural sample. The Reasons for Living Inventory and Worldview Analysis Scale were administered together with measures of hopelessness and depressive symptoms to 139 African American and 161 European American participants. Cultural worldview functioned as a moderator for African American but not European American participants in predicting reasons for living scores. African Americans who reported a less African-centered worldview also reported fewer reasons for living as hopelessness increased. However, African Americans who reported a more African-centered worldview reported less justification to live as depressive symptoms increased. These findings provide insight to suicide resilience profiles across and within ethnic groups and suggest that assessments of reasons for living and cultural correlates might have important implications for future research and clinical practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

This chapter explores trends from the Ministry of Justice sentencing statistics (available at www.gov.uk/government/collections/criminal-justice-statistics-quarterly). Understanding sentencing patterns is complicated by the fact that offenders often appear for sentencing having been convicted of several offences. Sometimes the offender has been charged with multiple crimes arising from the same incident; sometimes the offender will be charged with a single offence but will ask the court to take a number of others into consideration. Offenders may ask a court to impose punishment for crimes for which they have not been charged in order to clear their account as it were, perhaps because they are aware that at some point charges will be laid. The other reason for asking for other offences to be taken into account is that although additional punishment will be imposed, the offender is likely to benefit from some reduction for having freely conceded the crimes.

Much of the scholarship on legitimacy and criminal justice has focused on the ways that perceptions of legitimacy are shaped by contact with criminal justice professionals, notably the police. This chapter explores the relationship between the nature of the sentencing regime and public perceptions of penal legitimacy, or what we refer to as “empirical legitimacy ” (see Hinsch, Political legitimation without morality, (pp. 39–52). London: Springer, 2008). Part I explores public attitudes to sentencing and the reasons why the public in many countries may perceive their sentencing system to lack legitimacy. Part II explores ways of enhancing public perceptions of sentencing legitimacy. This includes the outline of what a “high legitimacy” sentencing regime would look like. In order to be perceived as legitimate, a sentencing regime needs to contain certain essential features. It must be (and must be perceived to be): (a) clear and transparent; (b) consistent in application and therefore predictable; (c) sensitive to the input of all relevant parties; (d) grounded in sound principles. Finally, we argue that the sentencing system must be communicated to the public in an understandable fashion in order to avoid erroneous expectations. The mere existence of sound sentencing principles is insufficient to ensure a high degree of empirical legitimacy.

This essay explores and critiques a theory of criminal justice which privileges the role of public intuitions about punishment over more traditional influences on sentencing principles and practice. This movement may be termed ‘Democratising Punishment’ and it has important consequences for sentencing in all jurisdictions. Several recent books advocate reforms such as deriving sentencing principles from public opinion research or sentencing by juries rather than legal professionals. In the essay we critique this perspective and note the threats to principled sentencing arising from greater public involvement in the sentencing of offenders.

This article reviews public opinion research relating to imprisonment. Thefocus is upon British attitudes, but wherever possible we place findings from this countryin an international context. Most members of the public report little familiarity with theprison system – few people report having had any direct contact with a penal institution.A common finding around the world is that most people believe that prison conditions arequite easy; this belief helps to explain low public levels of confidence in the prison system.Despite these trends, the public does not wish to make prison life harsher merely for thepurpose of punishment. People want and expect prisoners to improve their lives whileinside, although there is widespread scepticism that rehabilitation is possible in today’sprisons. Although the traffic of people in and out of the prison gates today is large,nevertheless the prison is a silent world still shrouded in mystery. (Blom-Cooper1976, p.72) Despite the efforts of legislators to counter the problem, prison popula-tions are stable or rising in most western jurisdictions (see below). Oneexplanation for this state of affairs is the apparently strong public supportfor imprisonment as a sanction. Judges and magistrates feel underpressure to respond to public pressure on this issue (see Hough, Jacobsonand Millie 2003). However, relatively little is known about public viewsregarding imprisonment, as the emphasis in the public opinion literaturehas been upon sentencing rather than the nature of custody per se.Weknow that when asked to sentence offenders convicted of serious crimes ofviolence, most people support the imposition of a term of custody. It isequally clear from several reviews that the public believes the sentencingprocess is too lenient (for example, Cullen, Fisher and Applegate 2000;Roberts and Stalans 1997; Roberts 1992) and also that people in differentcountries underestimate the severity of current court practices (forexample, Roberts and Hough 2005; Roberts 1998; Mattinson and

The wide-ranging Criminal Justice Act of 2003 introduces a number of changes to the sentencing of offenders in England and Wales. One of the most significant changes is that the purposes of sentencing are set out in legislation. The statutorily listed purposes include punishment, the reduction of crime, rehabilitation, protection of the public, and reparation. In addition, the Act creates, for the first time, a Sentencing Guidelines Council with a mandate to develop sentencing guidelines. The criminal history provisions of the new Act mean that an offender’s previous convictions will henceforth carry significantly more weight at sentencing. The manner in which this is to be achieved echoes the use of criminal history in many of the U.S. sentencing guideline schemes. These reforms are likely to transform sentencing practices in Britain significantly. Before reviewing the relevant provisions of the new Act, however, some discussion of their origins is necessary.

Within the past decade, restorative justice has emerged as a truly global phenomenon. Although retributive justice has dominated the penal landscape, more recently, restorative principles at sentencing have attracted increased attention. Restorative sentencing emphasizes the importance of compensation and reconciliation between victims and offenders and pays less attention to establishing proportionality between the seriousness of the offense and the severity of the sentence imposed. Although voluminous (and proliferating), the scholarly literature on restorative justice has to date neglected one critical issue: public opinion with respect to this justice paradigm. Public opinion researchers too, have generally overlooked this topic. The goal of this paper is to determine which elements of the new paradigm generate public approval, and which features are likely to encounter or provoke public opposition, drawing upon related international research published in English over the past 20 years (1982–2002). The review reveals widespread support for “restorative” sentencing options, such as community service, compensation, and restitution, particularly when applied to young offenders. However, it also seems clear that public support for these alternatives to punitive sentencing options declines as the seriousness of the offence increases, suggesting strong public adherence to the retributive principle of proportionality in sentencing.

A number of jurisdictions, including England and Wales, have recently experienced rising prison populations and this has renewed the search for fresh alternatives to incarceration. Following the recommendations of the Home Office Sentencing Review of 2001, the Criminal Justice Bill 2002 contains a suspended term of imprisonment, which is a form of conditional sentence for England and Wales. Although conditional sentences of various kinds exist in many Western nations, the Canadian experience carries the most lessons for other jurisdictions. A conditional sentence of imprisonment designed to replace actual terms of custody was introduced in 1996. The offender is sentenced to a term of imprisonment, but discharges the sentence while living in the community, under supervision. As long as they comply with a number of conditions, offenders serving conditional sentences will not actually spend any time in a correctional institution. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of this sanction to date. Results indicate that the conditional sentence has occasioned a significant drop in the number of admissions to custody, and with only a minor degree of net widening. The paper concludes by drawing some general conclusions from the Canadian experience with this alternative to imprisonment.

Sweeping changes have recently been made to punishment practices in many western nations. A number of these have reflected punitive, penal populism. The purpose of this essay is to examine recent reforms in New Zealand which reflect a philosophy of “bifurcation” with respect to the punishment of offenders. Harsher treatment is introduced with respect to the more serious forms of offending, while at the same time other elements of the Sentencing Act represent a more rational and moderate approach to sentencing reform. The Sentencing Act 2002 introduces a number of changes to the sentencing process in New Zealand. This article reviews some of the more important elements of the Act, beginning with the legislated statement of the purposes and principles of sentencing. The statutory purposes include the goals of rehabilitation, deterrence and incapacitation that have been cited in similar statements in other jurisdictions. The author explores the significance of various components of the Sentencing Act in light of experience in other jurisdictions such as Canada and England and Wales. In a number of areas the New Zealand statute offers a superior alternative to statutory language adopted in other countries.

Statutory reforms of the juvenile justice system came to Canada in 2003 when the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) became law. This article reviews the principal sentencing provisions and, in particular, the purposes and principles that are now codified as a result of the new legislation. The legislation attempts to reduce the number of young offenders sent to prison while facilitating the imposition of harsher sentences on a small number of juveniles convicted of the most serious offenses. The YCJA moves youth court sentencing closer to sentencing as it is conducted in adult court but also maintains some important differences between the two levels. These reforms are likely to reduce the number of young persons sent to prison in Canada and change the composition of the juvenile prison population by reducing the number of young offenders incarcerated for minor crimes or property crimes.

Contributors Introduction: Exploring the Normative Significance of Public Opinion for State Punishment, Jesper Ryberg and Julian V. Roberts Chapter 1: Penal Theory, Moral Intuitions, and Public Opinion, Jesper Ryberg Chapter 2: Proportionality Theory and Popular Opinion, Matt Matravers Chapter 3: The Proper Role of Community in Determining Criminal Liability and Punishment, Paul H. Robinson Chapter 4: Proportionality in Sentencing: The Need to Factor in Community Experience, Not Public Opinion, Mirko Bagaric Chapter 5: Penal Theory and Popular Opinion: The Deficiencies of Direct Engagement, Jan W. de Keijser Chapter 6: Why Should We Care What the Public Thinks? A Critical Assessment of the Claims of Popular Punishment, Frej K. Thomsen Chapter 7: Public Opinion and Democratic Control of Sentencing Policy, Christopher Bennett Chapter 8: Criminal Prosecutors: Experts or Elected Officials?, Richard L. Lippke Chapter 9: Stakeholder Sentencing, Thom Brooks Chapter 10: Repellent Institutions and the Absentee Public: Grounding Opinion in Responsibility for Punishment, Albert W. Dzur Chapter 11: Clarifying the Significance of Public Opinion for Sentencing Policy and Practice, Julian V. Roberts Notes Bibliography Index

Objective: One justification for a statutory ban on physical punishment is that passage of such legislation changes public attitudes towards the use of this form of parental discipline. The experience in Sweden is often cited as an example of legislation which changed public opinion. The aim of this brief article is to review the public opinion findings in Sweden in order to evaluate in greater detail the impact of changing the law. Method: A search was conducted to generate all published and publicly-available quantitative surveys of the public in Sweden and elsewhere. Results: The results of time-series analysis of the data are clear. The 1979 legal reform in Sweden did not reduce the level of public support for parental use of corporal punishment as a means of disciplining children. Support for physical punishment began declining years before the reform was passed and the decline was in no way accelerated by the law reform. Changes in public opinion may have generated the legal reform, but the reverse is not true. Data from other jurisdictions also support the view that there is no relationship between the status of the law and the nature of public views with regard to corporal punishment. This result is consistent with analyses of the effects of legal reforms in other areas. Conclusions: The Swedish ban on corporal punishment did not affect public attitudes. Changing public views requires other initiatives.

The paper presents an overview of the Upper Adriatic as a contact area between different cultural, social, economic and political entities, producing potential conflicts in the last century. The first part of the 20th century represented a classic example of geopolitical conflict through two World Wars and their related Peace Conferences that deeply impacted the region. Conflicts arising from the mid-century solution of the Trieste question transformed the Upper Adriatic into a laboratory of contemporary political geographic transformation. Changing geopolitical patterns have also modified the political, social and ethnic construction of the Upper Adriatic. The process of creating new international boundaries in the region ended in 1991 with the independence of Slovenia and Croatia. Through these geopolitical transformations in the Upper Adriatic, new political geographic attitudes evolved. Early on, Ratzel's geopolitical principles of defining borders as power barometers between neighbors dominated. More recently, attitudes have reflected modern integrative ideas with a focus on looking for harmony and the elimination of international conflicts. Greater attention has thus been given to the political geography of `everyday life', inter-ethnic relations, and cross-border contacts. Hence, `new' borderlands of the Upper Adriatic are more receptive to integration because they seek to overcome conflicts caused by the division of traditionally homogeneous spaces as local level political and ideological hindrances disappear. The region divided among Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia is becoming a new and special type of European borderland in the new century.

This article analyses Roger Hood’s 1992 study of race and sentencing, which found evidence of possible racial discrimination in certain Crown Courts. Examining recent criticisms of the validity of these findings, it is suggested that an adequate threshold of significance was used in the study; that the exclusion of certain status variables did not invalidate the study’s findings; and that the choice of which sentencing variables to control for is ultimately a normative matter. Next, the article considers what steps – other than alleviating discrimination – would be needed to reduce racial imbalance in the prisons. It is argued that little is likely to be gained by seeking to make ‘social adversity’ a basis for sentencing mitigation; and that policies before the sentencing stage would need to be altered instead – for example, those relating to drug-law enforcement.

This article seeks to link electoral behavior and borderland ethnic minority patterns. Results of the November 1993 mayoral election in Trieste, and the March 1994 and April 1996 national elections in Italy are studied in reference to the distribution of the Slovene minority in Northeastern Italy, specifically in the eastern part of the Region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia adjoining the boundary with Slovenia. The history of this borderland is rampant with conflict and territorial sovereignty changes. Recent events – the end of the Cold War, the breakup of Yugoslavia and independence of Slovenia, and the collapse of the Italian political party system – have served both to ease traditional tensions but also to exacerbate ethnic relations between Italians and the Slovene minority. The impact of Italian electoral reform and political party reformulation on the region is examined. Specifically, Mayor Illy's election in the city of Trieste in 1993 and voting patterns in the borderland Goriziano district of the Italian Senate for both the 1994 and 1996 elections are studied in some detail. The article concludes that while electoral campaigns and election results are marked with ethnic confrontation and contrasts, evidence suggests that, despite continuing nationalist tendencies, greater understanding and cooperation between Italians and Slovenes are emerging.

The relationship between crime and race or ethnicity has important implications for Canada. The constitution affirms the country's multicultural heritage. As in other Western nations, certain minorities are overrepresented in the prison population. Aboriginal and black offenders account for a disproportionate number of admissions. There has not been much research on why such disproportions exist, except concerning Aboriginal Canadians. Canada is not immune to problems of discrimination. Compared with whites, black accuseds are significantly more likely to be denied pretrial release on bail and, for certain offenses, to be incarcerated.

After twenty days of intense negotiations in November 1995 at Wright‐Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio among the presidents of Bosnia‐Herzegovina, Serbia (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) and Croatia, peace finally came to war‐ravaged Bosnia. This article applies political‐geographic approaches to an analysis of the Dayton Accords so as to provide constructive criticism and analytical insights, and to suggest policy recommendations. The literature of political geography provides a number of useful conceptual approaches with which to analyse particular aspects of the Agreement. This article applies boundary and frontier studies, peace geography and Hartshorne's functional approach to selected aspects of the Dayton Accord, yielding some recommendations and interesting insights as well as raising some serious questions about the longer‐term viability of the Bosnian State.

The absorption of the former German Democratic Republic into the German Federal Republic has drawn attention to the process of reunification of states partitioned as a result of the Cold War. While German reunification has already attracted political geographic study, no comparative analysis of the reunification process has yet been made. This study represents an initial attempt to point the way to a clearer understanding of the reunification process in formerly partitioned states by a comparative analysis in testing generalizations about the process. Three hypotheses are applied to two Cold War cases of partitioned nation-state reunification—Vietnam (1975-76) and Germany (1990). A winners-and-losers hypothesis addresses the fate of societal elites resulting from unification. A persistent-dissimilarities hypothesis contends that political, economic, and social differences and inequities will persist and cause stress between the two segments of the unifying societies. Finally, a borderlands-to-cen...

Most criminal justice systems accord a central role to an offender's criminal history in the determination of sentence, although the importance of previous convictions varies across jurisdictions. In countries such as Canada, Australia, England and Wales, criminal record plays a critical but limited role in sentencing. Elsewhere, in several American states, criminal record is primary, eclipsing even the seriousness of the offence of conviction as a determinant of sentence severity.(1) Criminal history is relevant in jurisdictions with formal guideline systems, as well as countries that have traditionally eschewed such attempts to structure sentencing practices. Most penal codes around the world also contain repetitive offender provisions that prescribe higher penalties for recidivists, or which defer parole eligibility for the recidivist offender.(2) Statutory premiums for recidivists are not new--for example, the Indictable Offences Bill, introduced in England well over a century ago, provided a mandatory minimum sentence for repeat offenders.(3) Finally, it is worth noting that public attitudes regarding sentencing are also strongly influenced by the offender's criminal antecedents. Survey research in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere suggests that when members of the public are asked to "sentence" offenders, support for incarceration increases as a direct function of the number of prior convictions.(4) Justifying the "Recidivist Premium" The exact impact of criminal record is determined, in theory, by the nature of the underlying sentencing purpose(s). Some desert theorists, including Andrew von Hirsch and Martin Wasik,(5) regard criminal history as being relevant to the sentencing decision, albeit in a limited way. They argue that our everyday moral judgements incorporate the notion of leniency towards people who transgress for the first time. According to this view, a lapse into criminality after a lifetime of lawabiding behavior should be responded to with a certain degree of tolerance. The result is a first offender discount. As Wasik and Von Hirsch note: "A first offender, after being confronted with censure or blame, is capable--as a reasoning human being presumed capable of ethical judgments--of reflecting on the morality of what he has done and of making an extra effort to show greater restraint. What we do, in granting the discount [to first offenders], is to show respect for this capacity--and thereby give the offender a so-called 'second chance.' With repetitions, however, the discount should begin to diminish and eventually disappear."(6) In practice, this justification is known as the progressive loss of mitigation.(7) However, there are other desert theorists (such as George Fletcher and Alexis Durham III) who see little role for criminal record in the determination of sanction(8). According to their perspective, there should be no discount for first offenders, and no increase in sentence severity as a function of the number of previous convictions. Neither version of desert theory distinguishes between offenders with lengthy, but varying criminal histories. For Wasik and Von Hirsch, such offenders can no longer claim that their current transgressions are at odds with their actions to that point; they have had their "second chance." For the other desert theorists, there is no role for criminal record to mitigate sentence even for first offenders. The utilitarian sentencing purposes use an offender's criminal record in a very different way. An incapacitation strategy would give primary weight to the offender's criminal record, on grounds that the actuarial probability of future offending depends largely on the number and nature of priors. Advocates of individual deterrence would take a re-conviction as evidence that a harsher sentence was now required as the previous sentence clearly failed to deter the offender. Some form of recidivist premium then is justified according to almost all sentencing theories. …

Book synopsis: 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.

Victim participation in sentencing has become an important theme in the victims’ rights literature and continues to be the subject of much debate among academics, practitioners, courts, and the wider public. The debate about the role and effects of victim impact statements (VIS) and family impact statements continues in most common law jurisdictions. The responses to our initial article in this journal illustrate the importance and diversity of this debate across the world, within domestic and international legal orders. This article responds to the commentaries upon our original article. We continue to argue that the primary aim of ancillary harm should be to inform the courts on the seriousness of the crime in order to facilitate the determination of a more proportionate sentence. We do not support a victim-centred approach where sentencing decisions rest on victims’ suggestions and opinions. Further, we do not claim that compensation and therapy for victims should be the primary role of sentencing. Instead, our position rests on retributive grounds and proposes a balanced approach to sentencing where all relevant factors are considered, including ancillary harm as an aggravating factor. We acknowledge the importance of limits, namely on the content of VIS, the effect of ancillary harm, and the importance of its reasonable foreseeability as a criteria for considering the aggravating effect of ancillary harm.

Preface, Anthony Bottoms and Julian Roberts, 1. The victim, the state, and civil society, Matt Matravers, 2. The 'duty to understand': what consequences to victim participation?, Anthony Bottoms, 3. The status of crime victims and witnesses in the 21st century, Helen Reeves and Peter Dunn, 4. 'Rebalancing the criminal justice system in favour of the victim': the costly consequences of populist rhetoric, Michael Tonry, 5. The phenomenon of victim-offender overlap: a study of offences against households, Anthony Bottoms and Andrew Costello, 6. The victim and the prosecutor, John Spencer, 7. Victims at court: necessary accessories or principal players at Cozijn centre stage?, Joanna Shapland and Matthew Hall, 8. 'Hearing victims of crime': the delivery of impact statements as ritual behaviour in four London trials for murder and manslaughter, Paul Rock, 9. Communication at sentencing: the expressive function of Victim Impact Statements, Julian Roberts and Edna Erez, 10. Victim input at parole: probative or prejudicial?, Nicola Padfield and Julian Roberts, Index

This article discusses the Quebec Court of Appeal decision in Cook that provides an unambiguous affirmation of the importance of victim impact evidence as a source of aggravation at sentencing. If followed in other jurisdictions, the decision will have a significant impact on the evolution of victim impact statements. To date, the victim impact statement has remained in a legal no man’s land, somewhere between an unsworn statement made by the victim, which may (or may not) be entered into the record and a form of evidence that can affect the quantum of punishment and hence the liberty interests of the defendant. This state of affairs is unsatisfactory for all concerned. In our view a victim impact statement serves a number of purposes, some expressive in nature. We discuss the concept of ancillary harm — inflicted on secondary crime victims — to demonstrate the utility of impact statements as a source of legally-relevant information at sentencing. We conclude that an impact statement is evidence that enables the court to reach a more accurate determination of the harm created by the offence. In this sense the use of victim impact evidence promotes the principle of proportionality at sentencing. This evidence is properly adduced at a separate penalty phase of the criminal process, namely the sentencing hearing.

In Lk. 10.17-20 Jesus' first statement to the returning missionaries has traditionally been translated, 'I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven' (10.18). A wide variety of interpretations have been offered, concerning when and how Jesus saw or will see Satan fall: before creation, at the temptations, during the disciples' mission, at the crucifixion, etc. The article proposes that the imperfect έθεΏρουν be translated not 'I saw' but 'they [sc. 'the demons' in 10.17] saw', and hence that Jesus' response to the disciples is an explanation of their successful exorcisms: the demons became subject to the disciples because they had seen their leader, Satan, dethroned.