Sentencing, Public Opinion, and Criminal Justice – Essays in Honour of Julian V. Roberts

 

Edited by Marie Manikis and Gabrielle Watson

 

£100, Oxford University Press

 

★★★★✩

The appropriateness of custodial sentences is a popular topic for UK media outlets, with the popular spin being that they are not long enough and not enough people are being locked up. But if you want some facts and reasoned argument on the subject, then this is the book for you. 

There are 16 essays on the topic, with interesting and surprising comparisons between the UK’s approach and other countries. The first few essays cover the basic principles from a rigorously academic standpoint. The topics then expand into looking at the philosophical approach to punishment but also some very specific studies, such as the usefulness of sentencing guidelines.

Sentencingcover

I found some of the concluding essays to be the most interesting, with discussion on how to balance the academic approach to sentencing with maintaining public confidence. With the current fashion for arguments that there is ‘two-tier justice’ and prisons are full to capacity, penal populism shows little sign of abating, so it is useful to read a serious study of the topic.

The book is a Festschrift, written in honour of the legal academic and honorary KC Julian V Roberts, so there is inevitably some overlap between the essays as they reference Roberts’ work on the topic. But they are all very well written and provide superb insight on a very important topic.

 

Lee Wall is an associate solicitor with Irvings Law in Liverpool

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