Nicola Carr

Punishment, sentencing and probation

When compared with prison sentences, community penalties are frequently viewed as somehow falling short, certainly in terms of their punitive content. The view that consequently community sentences should be ‘toughened’ up has informed significant legislative changes in England and Wales over the past 30 years, most pertinently through the introduction of the concept of ‘punishment in the community’ in the Criminal Justice Act 1991, and the more recent introduction of legislation (Crime and Courts Act, 2013), which provided that all community penalties should include a punitive component. The policy trend since the 1990s has been towards the introduction of more punitive orders, a greater variety of community penalties, and the melding of different requirements within one order (Bottoms, 2017). In essence, the punitive elements of community sentences have been ratcheted up, in order to conjure up the penal imaginary that community sentences compete with prisons in terms of their penal bite. Interestingly, recent analysis by Bottoms (2017) based on data produced by the Ministry of Justice both pre and post the introduction of the Crime and Courts Act, 2013, shows no substantive differences in the composition of Community Orders, suggesting that sentencers did not necessarily consider the need to toughen up community sentences in the same way that policy-makers did. That said, what is evident from more recent data is that there has been a fall-off in the use of community sentences in England and Wales. This trend pre-dates the imposition of the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms; however, as the growing volume of evidence attests, the issue of sentencer confidence in community sentences is undoubtedly impacted by the continued difficulties in the delivery of community sentences in the post-TR landscape. The Justice Committee’s Report on Transforming Rehabilitation (2018) presents more damning evidence of an illthought-out policy that has failed to deliver the much vaunted ‘rehabilitation revolution’, and the Committee ultimately concludes that the entire TR project should be revisited:

Tackling Racial Equality

This report sets out to provide a comparative overview of different countries’ statutory approaches to racial equality. The paper focuses on “... The measures to protect and improve the position of the visible population who are the victims of racism and racial discrimination, whether or not they are of immigrant origin” (p.v). In my view this focus on a ‘visible population’ is problematic: what exactly does this mean and who are the invisible population?