Sentencing: A Social Process: Re-thinking Research and Policy [Hardcover]

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.

Sentencing: A Social Process Re-thinking Research and Policy, offers a convincing critique of contemporary sentencing research and policy literatures. Eloquently and eruditely written & . Tatas (2020) book makes an impressive contribution to the current state of literature in sentencing research and policy is a must-read for anyone interested in sentencing decision-making. (Niamh Maguire, Probation Journal, Vol. 68 (2), June, 2021)

Tatas book is persuasively and beautifully writlS