Professor Michael Zander questions the way sentencing reform is going forward
The sentencing system is currently the object of radical potential reform following Lord Carter's report of last December (Securing the Future—Proposals for the Efficient and Sustainable Use of Custody in and ). In my view, the apparent rush to implement Carter's proposals amounts to a public scandal.
Carter's terms of reference were to consider options for improving the balance between the supply of, and demand for, prison places. The context was a prison population of 81,000, double what it had been only 15 years ago. His report made two main recommendations: 1) build more prisons and; 2) set up a working group to consider the advantages and disadvantages of scrapping our sentencing system and replacing it with style-structured sentencing along the lines of the and systems.
The essence of structured sentencing `a la Minnesota is a grid system that drastically restricts the scope for judicial discretion in sentencing with a view to maximising both consistency and predictability
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