This paper reports the findings of an empirical research project, exploring ongoing attempts to mainstream restorative justice within two English police forces and examining how the police understood and used restorative justice in practice. The findings suggest that two institutional prioritiesto satisfy victims and manage the demand on the police's timestrongly influenced the interpretation and practice of restorative justice. This created tensions as police officers who facilitated restorative justice processes used their discretion to determine, on a case-by-case basis, how best to balance these institutional goals with the restorative goal of stakeholder empowerment. These findings illustrate how the police can implement abstract concepts in a selective, discretionary manner, and enhances the limited empirical literature that explains how existing priorities and embedded ways of working within criminal justice agencies, shape their understanding and use of restorative justice in practice. Such knowledge is crucial, if we are to help maximise the benefits and minimise the risks of restorative justice and restorative policing. The article also introduces the concept of 'managed empowerment' to help explain how the tensions between restorative and institutional goals manifested themselves.

Sentence severity has increased in England and Wales in recent years. The causes of the increase remain unclear. One possible explanation relates to the introduction of sentencing guidelines, which seem to coincide in time with the increase in sentence severity. To date, investigations of this hypothesis have been limited to simple exploratory analyses or to specific offences. We use a new scale of sentence severity-developed using Thurstone scaling and the participation of 21 magistrates-and time-series modelling to explore whether a causal effect can be attributed to seven different guidelines. We corroborate the existence of an increase in sentence severity; however, we do not find conclusive evidence pointing at the guidelines having caused it.

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Although it has long been acknowledged that heuristics influence judicial decision making, researchers have yet to explore how sentencing guidelines might interact with heuristics to shape sentencing decisions. This article contributes to addressing this gap in the literature in three ways: first, by considering how heuristics might help produce the phenomenon of sentence clustering, in which a significant proportion of sentences are concentrated around a small number of outcomes; second, by reflecting on the role of sentencing guidelines as a feature of the environment within which sentencing decisions are made; and third, by analysing the guidelines from Minnesota and from England and Wales, theorizing how their content might interact with heuristics to make clustering more or less likely. Ultimately, we argue that sentencing guidelines likely affect the role played by heuristics in shaping sentencing decisions and, consequently, that their design should be informed by research evidence from the decision sciences.

The advent of COVID-19 prompted the enforced isolation of elderly and vulnerable populations around the world, for their own safety. For people in prison, these restrictions risked compounding the isolation and harm they experienced. At the same time, the pandemic created barriers to prison oversight when it was most needed to ensure that the state upheld the rights and wellbeing of those in custody. This article reports findings from a unique collaboration in Ireland between the Office of the Inspector of Prisons – a national prison oversight body – and academic criminologists. Early in the pandemic, they cooperated to hear the voices of people ‘cocooning’ – isolated because of their advanced age or a medical vulnerability – in Irish prisons by providing journals to this cohort, analysing the data, and encouraging the Irish Prison Service to change practices accordingly. The findings indicated that ‘cocooners’ were initially ambivalent about these new restrictions, both experiencing them as a punishment akin to solitary confinement, and understanding the goal of protection. As time passed, however, participants reported a drastic impact on their mental and physical health, and implications for their (already limited) agency and relationships with others, experienced more or less severely depending on staff and management practices. The paper also discusses the implications for prison practices during and following the pandemic, understanding isolation in the penological context, and collaboration between prison oversight bodies and academics.