Overview

Parliament and the judiciary have different and complementary roles in determining sentencing; Parliament sets the overall legislative framework, sentencers determine the individual sentence in a particular case. In the middle sit sentencing guidelines. The Justice Committee provides a form of parliamentary comment on these by considering draft sentencing guidelines. This is an area that has recently been subject to debate in terms of how to enhance democratic engagement within the constitutional framework. The Committee's work with sentencing guidelines suggests that more attention needs to be paid to how sentencing contributes to public confidence in the criminal justice system, and to the costs of different sentences and their relative effectiveness in achieving the purposes of sentencing. These areas will be the priorities for the Committee's scrutiny of sentencing guidelines, and scrutiny of criminal justice policy more broadly. The danger of a sentencing policy based on misconceptions about what the public wants is that, over the longer term, resources will be diverted away from a sentencing framework that is effective in reducing re-offending, in turn creating more victims of crime. There are still fundamental questions to be answered in discerning what works in achieving an effective sentencing framework.

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