Cyrus Tata

TL;DR: In this article, an ethnographic study of social enquiry and sentencing in the Scottish courts is presented, which explores the nature of the practice of social inquiry and explores the extent to which this practice is being reconfigured in line with the recent accounts of penal transformation.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present an ethnographic analysis of criminal justice social workers writing presentence reports for the Scottish courts, finding that social workers were uncertain of their place within the legal domain and concerned about their credibility as criminal justice professionals.

TL;DR: In this paper, a critical look at a series of binary categories which have dominated the scholarly and reform epistemologies of the sentencing decision process is presented, including the following: rules versus discretion; reason versus emotion; offence versus offender; normative principles versus incoherence, aggravating versus mitigating factors; aggregate/tariff consistency versus individualised sentencing.

TL;DR: The authors conducted a four-year qualitative study in Scotland examining how reports are constructed by report writers, what the writers aim to convey to the sentencing judge, and how those same reports are then interpreted and used in deciding sentence.

TL;DR: In this article, a critical look at a series of binary categories which have dominated the scholarly and reform epistemologies of the sentencing decision process is presented, including the following: rules versus discretion, reason versus emotion, offence versus offender, normative principles versus incoherence, aggravating versus mitigating factors, aggregate/tariff consistency versus individualized sentencing.