Cyrus Tata, Sentencing: A Social Process – Re-Thinking Research and Policy
| Author | David Hayes |
| Date | 01 July 2021 |
| Published date | 01 July 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520953695 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
establishes with respondents adds warmth, humanity, and greater insight into his
analysis of their lives and how they make sense of the penal state.
I could easily continue listing the qualities and contributions the book makes.
Stick Together and Come Back Home is a wonderful book that deserves a place
alongside classic ethnographies of punishment.
ORCID iD
Aaron Kupchik https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9241-6510
Aaron Kupchik
Professor
Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, University of Delaware, USA
Cyrus Tata, Sentencing: A Social Process – Re-Thinking Research and Policy,
Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2020; 190 pp. ISBN 9783030010591, £44.99
(hbk)
In Sentencing: A Social Process – Re-Thinking Research and Policy, Cyrus Tata
argues that current academic and policy thinking about sentencing is fundamentally
limited by a tendency towards an individuating perspective. Tata divides contempo-
rary sentencing literature into two broad camps: the ‘legal-rational’ and ‘judicial-
defensive’ traditions (pp. 14–15). The former is concerned with the danger of dis-
cretion resulting in irrational and inconsistent decision-making, contrary to values
such as fairness and equality before the law. The latter posits that each case is wholly
unique, and that doing justice therefore requires a certain amount of discretion to
prevent overly mechanical application of laws to incommensurable hard cases.
Tata argues that while these two traditions are normatively opposed, both agree
on an ontological level that sentencing practice involves trade-offs between mutu-
ally exclusive domains of law against fact, and rule against discretion. This ten-
dency in sentencing literature towards ‘autonomous individualism’ (p. 24)
conceives of sentencing as a series of professional domains in which individual
decision-makers ‘own’, and exert independent control over, parts of the process.
For the legal-rational tradition, this renders sentencing a process of individual
decision-making by judges, which requires rationalisation to prevent inconsistency.
The judicial-defensive tradition, conversely, is an attempt to protect judges’ own-
ership of the discretion to dispose of individual offenders. In this regard, Tata joins
an increasing trend in criminal law and justice theory to critique the foundations of
liberal theory – in this case, the Lockean equation of property ownership with
freedom – and the implications thereof for criminal policy.
By contrast, Tata’s social approach identifies three characteristics of sentencing.
It is, firstly, interpretive, in that the interface between rules and facts is, necessarily
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