Abstract
The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) confirms the Sentencing Guidelines as the axiom of sentencing policy. This indicates the importance of probation services need to respond proactively to this trend by ensuring offender managers (OMs) have a working knowledge of how to interpret and use the guidelines. Changes to community and suspended sentence orders simplify the pre-sentence assessment process and permit more OM discretion to allocate specific programmes to an offender post sentence based on need and present circumstance. The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act is returned largely to its original 1974 values and also extends the range of sentences eligible for rehabilitation. It is, however, the provisions relating to dangerous offenders and licence release that contains the most significant changes. Sentences for public protection are abolished and replaced with the new ‘automatic’ life sentences (ALS) and extended determinate sentence (EDS). The Secretary of State is given the power to amend, by statutory instrument, the release test for IPP and other indeterminate prisoners. The overall effect of the sentencing changes is to return gravity of offence as the primary sentencing tool at the expense of risk factors central to the 2003 Criminal Justice Act (CJA). A new legal aid scheme will now be administered within the Ministry of Justice.
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