Towards new sentencing and penal decision-making research agendas

How should sentencing and penal decision-making be studied? After explaining why it brackets sentencing and penal decision-making together, the chapter excavates tacit assumptions about how sentencing and penal decision-making does (and should) operate. In particular, a paradigm presuming property-owning autonomous individualism has limited research. The chapter shows how two key taken for granted ideas, (discretion versus official rules; and individual case ‘factors’), are projected with the characteristics of property-owning autonomous individualism. Instead, it is proposed that the study of the empirical reality of sentencing and penal decision-making should be conceived as a social process, including the use of ‘typified whole case stories’. Armed with this understanding, the chapter opens possible future research agendas.