Influencing Sentencers: Just Deserts and System Strategies

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to show how thinking and practice in pre-sentence report writing have developed since the early 1970s. From 1975 on, social enquiry reports, as they were then called, came under attack on both theoretical and empirical grounds, to the point where it became impossible to defend traditional models of practice. There were even suggestions that these reports should be abandoned altogether. Other writers, however, argued for a new rationale for reports which rejected the discredited ‘treatment model’ but still allowed for sentences to be individualised by taking into account the offender’s circumstances; the new model also encouraged thinking about presentence reports as a means of influencing the working of local criminal justice systems. Developments in juvenile justice in the 1980s, which both affected and reflected changes in legislation, suggested more grounds for optimism about the role of such reports, both in influencing sentencers and in providing a starting-point for relevant and appropriate forms of practice with people on probation. While practice remains uneven, and the they might have been, there are good grounds for believing that pre-sentence reports in the early 1990s are generally better, in quite specific ways, than they were ten years earlier. First, however, a cautionary note.