Impact
Through my career I have collaborated with a wide range of charities, think tanks, and criminal justice organisations: Liberty, Justice, the Centre for Public Data, the Sentencing Academy, the Sentencing Council for England and Wales, the Scottish Sentencing Council, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Parole Board, the Ministry of Justice, the Slovenia State Prosecutors Office, and Cumbria, West Yorkshire, and Bedfordshire Police Forces. As a result of those collaborations my research has influenced sentencing policy in the UK and other oversees jurisdictions. Here I list recent impact activities I have been involved in together with some of the most consequential policy changes directly stemming from my research.
Independent Review of the Criminal Courts
In response to Prof. David Ormerod request, I submitted evidence to the Independent Review of the Criminal Courts led by Sir Brian Levenson. In my submission, I indicate that the limited evidence available contradicts the view that magistrates are more punitive than Crown Court judges. For this reason, I recommend allowing a larger share of cases to be processed by the Magistrates’ Courts. I also highlight how the weak evidence base regarding court functioning and backlogs could be improved if the Ministry of Justice and HM Courts & Tribunals Service took further steps to share their data openly.
Independent Sentencing Review 2024 to 2025
I co-authored the Sentencing Academy response to the Independent Sentencing Review 2024 to 2025 led by the Rt Hon Mr David Gauke. One of my key contributions was demonstrating that sentence inflation is not uniform across offence categories. In some cases, apparent inflation trends simply reflect attrition in the criminal justice system — where only the more severe offences progress to court.
Pina-Sánchez, J., Roberts, J., & Bild, J. (2025). Technical Appendix: Plotting Sentence Severity and Crime Seriousness. CrimRxiv. https://doi.org/10.21428/cb6ab371.ec4fb0e7
Ethnic Disparities in MOPAC’s Knife Crime Tagging Programme
I assisted Liberty in the analysis of ethnic disparities in the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) knife crime tagging programme. Our findings provided evidence of large ethnic disparities (Black individuals were 87% more likely to be selected for the electronic monitoring scheme than white individuals), which helped reach a settlement in the Black Equity Organisation’s judicial review claim against MOPAC and MoJ.
The settlement includes a rapid review of the programme to address concerns of racial disproportionality to ensure fair and unbiased decision-making in the selection of those for tagging. Specific measures include:
- removing reference to gang involvement as a selection criterion for tagging,
- consistent collection of data of those selected for tagging, and
- improvements in communication so individuals know why they have been selected for tagging and how they can challenge their selection.
See further coverage of this case in this ITV news clip.
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