[D]ecisions at the sentencing stage affect the fundamental interests of the offender in just as coercive and intrusive a way as decisions at the conviction stage affect the defendant … Once we have conceived criminal justice as an integrated process with certain complex social functions, it almost amounts to bad faith to place so much emphasis on these doctrinal values at one stage of the process whilst virtually ignoring them at others.

[T]his focus upon the individual was not just a convenient means of aligning two opposed positions at their point of intersection; it was also, in itself, a means of gaining entry into the common sense of British penal policy … And the major assumption of that policy was – and is – that the individual is always the proper locus of penal intervention and concern.

[Crime’s danger] varies with the state of civil society; and this is the justification for sometimes attaching the penalty of death to a theft of a few pence or a turnip, and at other times a light penalty to a theft of a hundred or more times that amount.

In all the debate about sentencing and criminal justice policy in the last few years, the impacts on members of ethnic minorities, on the unemployed and on the mentally disordered have received little examination … The criminal justice system, and particularly the prison system, contains a disproportionate number of people with not just one but more than one of these characteristics.