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The British Journal of Criminology 37:529-548 (1997)
© 1997 Centre for Crime & Justice Studies (formerly ISTD)

RESEARCH-ARTICLE

PRE-SENTENCE REPORTS: The Effects of Legislation and National Standards

MICHAEL CAVADINO*

*Centre for Criminological and Legal Research, University of Sheffield. The survey on which this paper a based formed part of a larger study (financed by the Nuffield Foundation) of the effects of the Criminal Justice Act 1991 in four court areas in the North of England (Crow et al. 1996). My thanks are due to my colleagues in the larger research project (Iain Crow, James Dignan, Valerie Johnston and Monica Walker) on whose interview data I have drawn for this article, to the Nuffield Foundation, and to all the necessarily anonymous probation and social service staff who assisted this research by arranging and submitting to interviews and tracking down suitable reports for this study.

The Criminal Justice Act 1991 and the associated National Standards for the Supervision of Offenders in the Community (1992) replaced ‘social inquiry reports’ (SIRs) with new-style ‘pre-sentence reports’ (PSRs). This paper presents the results of a before-and-after study assessing the effects of the change on the reports themselves. Matched samples of SIRs from 1991 and PSRs from 1993, drawn from four separate court areas in the north of England and covering juveniles' reports provided by local authority social workers as well as probation officers, are compared for similarities and differences. The results show that there were highly significant differences between the SIRs and the PSRs, with the latter being much more likely to focus upon offending behaviour and discuss the seriousness of the offence. Report writers and sentencers were on the whole remarkably positive about the changes.


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