Predictive Sentencing addresses the role of risk assessment in contemporary sentencing practices. Predictive sentencing has become so deeply ingrained in Western criminal justice decision-making that despite early ethical discussions about selective incapacitation, it currently attracts little critique. Nor has it been subjected to a thorough normative and empirical scrutiny. This is problematic since much current policy and practice concerning risk predictions is inconsistent with mainstream theories of punishment. Moreover, predictive sentencing exacerbates discrimination and disparity in sentencing. Although structured risk assessments may have replaced 'gut feelings', and have now been systematically implemented in Western justice systems, the fundamental issues and questions that surround the use of risk assessment instruments at sentencing remain unresolved. This volume critically evaluates these issues and will be of great interest to scholars of criminal justice and criminology.

Table Of Contents

1. Introduction: Normative and Empirical Perspectives on Predictive Sentencing 

Jan W de Keijser, Julian V Roberts and Jesper Ryberg

2. The Use of Risk Assessment in Sentencing 

Esther FJC van Ginneken

3. Why Legal Philosophers (Including Retributivists) Should Be Less Resistant to Risk-Based Sentencing 

Douglas Husak

4. Risk and Retribution: On the Possibility of Reconciling Considerations of Dangerousness and Desert 

Jesper Ryberg

5. Is Preventive Detention Morally Worse than Quarantine? 

Th omas Douglas

6. Against Incapacitative Punishment 

Zachary Hoskins

7. A Defence of Modern Risk-Based Sentencing 7

Christopher Slobogin

8. Some Dilemmas of Indeterminate Sentences: Risk and Uncertainty, Dignity and Hope 

Andrew Ashworth and Lucia Zedner

9. The Problematic Role of Prior Record Enhancements in Predictive Sentencing 

Julian V Roberts and Richard S Frase

10. Unpacking Sentencing Algorithms: Risk, Racial Accountability and Data Harms 

Kelly Hannah-Moff at and Kelly Struthers Montford

11. The Scientific Validity of Current Approaches to Violence and Criminal Risk Assessment 

Seena Fazel

12. Risk Assessment at Sentencing: The Pennsylvania Experience 

Rhys Hester

13. Predictive Sentencing: An Analysis of Public Views 

Jan W de Keijser and Sigrid GC van Wingerden

14. Sentencing and Prediction: Old Wine in Old Bottles 

Michael Tonry