Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.

Journal Article 1: Genders, E., & Player, E. (2013). Rehabilitation, risk management and prisoners’ rights. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 14, 434–457.

URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/4wSnJ3DfIgKF3a3Aj97a/full

Abstract: The expansion of prison treatment programmes for personality disordered offenders as part of the ‘Rehabilitation Revolution’ in England and Wales raises significant questions about the ways in which inherent concepts of risks, rights and rehabilitation are selectively perceived and employed. Current policy supports rehabilitative opportunities that address the risks offenders pose to the public, yet remains inattentive to the risk of harm that rehabilitative programmes can pose to offenders. Examination of the risk of personal harm intrinsic to one rehabilitative intervention for personality disordered prisoners – the democratic therapeutic community – illustrates how the selective acknowledgement of human rights in contemporary penal policy, whereby prisoners’ rights are routinely tied to a status of less eligibility, has important consequences that both undermine the integrity of programme delivery and seriously jeopardize the positive duties that are inherent in the duty of care owed to prisoners by the State.

Journal Article 2: Marder, I. D., & Pina-Sánchez, J. (2018). Nudge the judge? Theorizing the interaction between heuristics, sentencing guidelines and sentence clustering. Criminology & Criminal Justice. doi:10.1177/1748895818818869

URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/XEYtSHj8XXRVGVUfJmkz/full

Abstract: Although it has long been acknowledged that heuristics influence judicial decision making, researchers have yet to explore how sentencing guidelines might interact with heuristics to shape sentencing decisions. This article contributes to addressing this gap in the literature in three ways: first, by considering how heuristics might help produce the phenomenon of sentence clustering, in which a significant proportion of sentences are concentrated around a small number of outcomes; second, by reflecting on the role of sentencing guidelines as a feature of the environment within which sentencing decisions are made; and third, by analysing the guidelines from Minnesota and from England and Wales, theorizing how their content might interact with heuristics to make clustering more or less likely. Ultimately, we argue that sentencing guidelines likely affect the role played by heuristics in shaping sentencing decisions and, consequently, that their design should be informed by research evidence from the decision sciences.