Abstract
‘At the heart of sentencing: Exploring whether more compassionate sentencing narratives reduce public punitiveness’ paper presented 40th Annual Congress of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, which was held online from 18 - 20 November 2021.
Associate Professor Anthony Hopkins2, Dr Shannon Dodd3, Professor Mark Nolan1,2, Professor Lorana Bartels2
1Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, Australia, 2The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, 3University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Compassion has the capacity to change how we think and feel about offenders, enabling us to understand individual and systemic causes of criminality and consider whether, and in what circumstances, desistance is possible. This has clear implications for actors within the criminal justice system, such as sentencing judges. However, compassion may also have a larger role to play in reorienting criminal justice law reform from its increasingly punitive trajectory. This raises the question of whether, and in what ways, compassion can be cultivated within the broader public. Using an experimental design, our research examined whether the use of a more compassionate narrative about an offender in both written and audio-visual sentencing remarks stimulated a less punitive response from members of the Australian public. Our results support the conclusion that it is possible to alter the features of a written or orally delivered sentence so that it is recognisably more compassionate, and that compassion- enhanced sentencing remarks have the capacity to increase the public’s willingness to recognise the suffering of offenders. Further, results showed that engagement with compassion- enhanced sentencing remarks altered criminal justice spending preferences, reducing the proportion of the criminal justice budget that members of the public believed should be spent on imprisonment.
Associate Professor Anthony Hopkins2, Dr Shannon Dodd3, Professor Mark Nolan1,2, Professor Lorana Bartels2
1Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, Australia, 2The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, 3University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Compassion has the capacity to change how we think and feel about offenders, enabling us to understand individual and systemic causes of criminality and consider whether, and in what circumstances, desistance is possible. This has clear implications for actors within the criminal justice system, such as sentencing judges. However, compassion may also have a larger role to play in reorienting criminal justice law reform from its increasingly punitive trajectory. This raises the question of whether, and in what ways, compassion can be cultivated within the broader public. Using an experimental design, our research examined whether the use of a more compassionate narrative about an offender in both written and audio-visual sentencing remarks stimulated a less punitive response from members of the Australian public. Our results support the conclusion that it is possible to alter the features of a written or orally delivered sentence so that it is recognisably more compassionate, and that compassion- enhanced sentencing remarks have the capacity to increase the public’s willingness to recognise the suffering of offenders. Further, results showed that engagement with compassion- enhanced sentencing remarks altered criminal justice spending preferences, reducing the proportion of the criminal justice budget that members of the public believed should be spent on imprisonment.
Original language | English |
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Publication status | Published - 19 Nov 2021 |
Event | https://www.anzappl.org/public/pages/annual-congress: ANZAPPL Annual Congress - Online, Sydney, Australia Duration: 18 Nov 2021 → 20 Nov 2021 https://www.anzappl.org/public/pages/annual-congress |
Conference
Conference | https://www.anzappl.org/public/pages/annual-congress |
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Country/Territory | Australia |
City | Sydney |
Period | 18/11/21 → 20/11/21 |
Internet address |