The Social Production of Sentencing

Developed in the shadow of legal formalism, depictions of sentencing discretion are dominated by images of autonomous individualism, in which the individual judge ‘owns’ the property of discretion, unless restricted by official legal rules. I argue instead for an approach which understands sentencing case ‘facts’ as necessarily and inescapably typified by the constructing practices of the criminal process and for a holistic approach based on ‘typified whole case stories’. In this way, decision-making can be conceived as both holistic and explicable.