Adam Graycar Director There is a widely held belief that the imposition of a mandatory sentence for a second or third offence will have a significant deterrent effect on that individual and will send a message to potential offenders. Advocates argue that it will bring consistency in sentencing and appease public concern about crime and punishment. This proposition has been debated vigorously in...

The United States Sentencing Commission was created to develop federal sentencing guidelines, which restrict judicial discretion and were found to increase the average sentence length while leaving unchanged the likelihood of resolution through plea bargaining. A game theoretic model is developed in which a sentencing commission may impose guidelines or defer to judicial discretion; then a defe...

People with mental impairment are so heavily over-represented in prisons and jails that jails have been labeled “warehouses for the mentally ill.” In many parts of the United States, there are more mentally impaired offenders in prisons than in hospitals for the mentally unwell. Offenders laboring with impaired mental functioning are often regarded as being less morally culpable for their crime...

IN AUSTRALIA, WHERE SENTENCING GUIDELINES ARE UNCOMMON, THE SEX of the offender is not officially a relevant factor in sentencing. However, as Fox and Freiberg (1985) note in their text on sentencing in Victoria, a bias in favour of women is 'well entrenched'. Numerous cases are cited in which the courts have stated that it was appropriate to apply a 'lower tariff for females' (p. 465). Appeals...

This commentary on Zhong et al. begins by addressing the definition of remorse. It then primarily focuses on the relation between remorse and various justifications for punishment commonly accepted in Anglo-American jurisprudence and suggests that remorse cannot be used in a principled way in sentencing. It examines whether forensic psychiatrists have special expertise in evaluating remorse and...

Thoroughly and consistently calculating losses from computer intrusions is a difficult endeavor because security incidents are characterized by intangible harms like interference with system availability and interference with the integrity of data. These harms can be difficult to translate into monetary terms. More easily measured are labor and hardware costs associated with repairing and resto...

This paper critiques, on legal and empirical grounds, the growing trend of basing criminal sentences on actuarial recidivism risk prediction instruments that include demographic and socioeconomic variables. I argue that this practice violates the Equal Protection Clause and is bad policy: an explicit embrace of otherwise-condemned discrimination, sanitized by scientific language. To demonstrate...