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The Humanising Work of the Sentencing Professions: Individualising and Normalising

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Sentencing: A Social Process

Part of the book series: Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies ((PSLS))

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Abstract

In their work, sentencing professionals do not simply make decisions about cases, but also communicate and solidify the boundaries of the exclusive professional ownership of a territory of sentencing work. In the repeated practice of solidifying these boundaries, the sentencing process is divided into individual, and separate entities, barely connected with each other. Yet for the person subject to the process, it has to be viewed as a jumble of inter-connecting implications. While professionals and supporting scholarship portray the process in linear and sequential terms, the person proceeded against has, (and is subtly encouraged), to connect the potential implications of past and future decisions with the immediate decision she faces. Without any controlling plan (indeed because of its very lack), the independent work of autonomous professions symbiotically achieves the implicitly-shared goals of the expeditious disposal of cases and the generation of ‘ideal’ offenders. This is done in two ways: through humanisation work which individualises and requires the person proceeded against to accept individual responsibility; and secondly, because of the loosely connected interfaces between the work of different professions, the person proceeded against has to try to anticipate the consequences of her self-presentation in one (seemingly autonomous) stage of the process for another.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Or in hybrid systems this may be delegated back-stage to report writers whose report is considered during the guilt-determination phase (Johansen 2018).

  2. 2.

    This sense of foreignness of two alien separate professional and academic worlds, may also be reflected in a key research gap. Unlike civil cases (e.g. Genn 1999; Genn and Paterson 2001 and), and despite all the policy endeavours based on assumptions of what defendants think and how they decide, there has been no research anywhere to follow through the experiences of defendants in observed cases from prior to plea through to the completion of the sentence.

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  1. University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

    Cyrus Tata

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Tata, C. (2020). The Humanising Work of the Sentencing Professions: Individualising and Normalising. In: Sentencing: A Social Process. Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01060-7_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01060-7_5

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