This book asks how we should make sense of sentencing when, despite huge efforts world-wide to analyse, critique and reform it, it remains an enigma. Sentencing: A Social Process reveals how both research and policy-thinking about sentencing are confined by a paradigm that presumes autonomous individualism, projecting an artificial image of sentencing practices and policy potential. By conceiving of sentencing instead as a social process, the book advances new policy and research agendas. Sentencing: A Social Process proposes innovative solutions to classic conundrums, including: rules versus discretion; aggravating versus mitigating factors; individualisation versus consistency; punishment versus rehabilitation; efficient technologies versus the quality of justice; and ways of reducing imprisonment. .