Sentencing Violent and Sexual Offenders in England and Wales

Abstract

In a prescient 1977 article, A. E. Bottoms1 described a policy process in which politicians, official working parties, policy makers, and sentencers distinguish ordinary, mundane or offenders from serious, excep tional and dangerous criminals. This process, which he termed bifurcation, is largely designed to keep the prison population constant in the face of rising crime rates. It is accomplished by locking up the minority of threatening offenders for longer terms while the non-threatening majority are sentenced to short periods of custody or to an expanded array of community penalties. This strategy enables the government to respond to an allegedly punitive public2 with tough rhetoric: the populace is reassured of the government's crackdown on crime while public expenditure for 'law and order' is kept within reasonable bounds. Thus, bifurcation entails a radical disjunction both in terms of the mode of punishment as well as its justification. While non-threatening offenders get their just deserts for serious crimes, threatening offenders are incapacitated. In addition, to address their abnormal behaviour, the latter are increasingly subjected to treatment programmes within a resurgent neo-rehabilitative corrections framework.