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.

Cyrus Tata is Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at Strathclyde University, Scotland, UK. 

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.