Chapter 31 Essay questions

  1. Why do Padfield and Tata argue that penal decision-making should be understood as ‘a process’, rather than a momentary formal act? What is the significance of understanding it as a ‘process’?
  2. What factors drive the high rate of guilty pleas? Should the situation concern us?
  3. What ought to be role, if any, for lay (non legally qualified) judges in a modern criminal justice system?
  4. What does the empirical evidence tell us about the claim that cases judged on their unique individual facts in a series of discrete independent steps?
  5. What factors drive the size of prison populations? Is promoting the use of community-based alternatives to prison the best way of controlling the prison population?
  6. In some countries there appears to be an increasing number of prisoners whose license is revoked or who are recalled to prison during the later stages of their sentence. What mechanisms ought to be available to a prisoner who thinks that he or she may have been wrongly recalled to prison?
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