Discover peer-reviewed journal articles and reports that use ADR UK-funded flagship datasets. This collection is being expanded over time.
As scholars of alcohol and other drugs we should be concerned with the ongoing development of criminal justice policy and the narratives it reinforces about the nature of the relationship between substance use/intoxication and crime. Intoxication is one of the most prevalent features of offending before the courts. As such it is key to understand how courts respond to cases involving alcohol or other drug intoxication both in terms of how they operate and the sentences they dispense. This editorial on the topic of courts and sentencing covers issues of how intoxication is dealt with in sentencing, specialist substance use courts and court-enforced alcohol abstinence. Drawing primarily upon examples in the English and Welsh context and pointing to similar developments across the globe, it argues that, when considered together, these parallel developments represent a trend towards the punitive reinforcement of the abstinence ideal in criminal justice policy.
Dataset used: Data First: Cross-Justice System - England and Wales
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In recent years, there has been considerable policy and academic interest in the existence of ethnic inequalities in the Criminal Justice System. A large body of sentencing research has been dedicated to exploring whether ethnic minority defendants are treated more harshly than similarly situated white defendants. This paper extends this research utilizing Ministry of Justice linked criminal justice datasets and multilevel models to assess the effect of ethnicity and other defendant case and contextual factors on sentencing outcomes in the Crown Court. The analysis shows that legal characteristics such as plea, pre-trial detention, offence type and severity are important factors determining sentencing outcomes although they do not fully explain disparities in these outcomes between ethnic groups. Ethnic disparities in imprisonment persist and, in some cases, become more pronounced after controlling for defendant case and court factors. In contrast, ethnic disparities in sentence length are largely explained by legal factors, and after adjusting for other predictors of sentencing outcomes, observed differences between most (but not all) ethnic minority groups and the white British disappear.
In the examination of sentencing disparities, hypotheses related to social class have been relatively overlooked compared to explanations centered on offenders' ethnicity. This oversight is regrettable as both factors often intertwine. In this study, we investigate the mediating and moderating effects between offenders' residential area deprivation and their ethnic background using administrative data encompassing all offences processed through the England and Wales Crown Court. Our findings reveal the following: (i) substantial ethnic disparities among drug offenders, but mostly non-existent across other offence categories; (ii) area deprivation does not explain away the observed ethnic disparities, but pronounced area disparities are found for breach and assault offenses, wherein offenders living in deprived areas are penalized compared to their more affluent counterparts; and (iii) ethnicity and area deprivation interact, but only for breach offenses.
