Sentencing and diversity: how do ethnicity and gender impact on the content and outcomes of sentences served in the community?

The proposed project will improve our understanding of ethnicity and gender in relation to the requirements of community-based sanctions. Better understanding of these relationships has been identified as crucial by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Probation's thematic inspections in relation to gender and ethnicity. The project will therefore allow for better informed policy development.
Equality is not just about treating everyone the same. Equality needs to take account of diversity and inclusivity. Adopting an approach to criminal justice which takes account of the different needs of women and men and the needs of people from different ethnic groups requires data that are disaggregated by gender and ethnicity. The proposed project will use the Data First datasets to examine the relative effectiveness of different requirements of community-based orders - assessed in terms of successful completion and the likelihood of future offending - in relation to ethnicity and gender, while controlling for other variables such as age and offence. Regression analyses will be used to address the following research questions:
o Are there differences between ethnic groups and men and women in the number and type of requirements that make up community orders
and suspended sentence orders, after controlling for other factors, such as age and severity of offence?
o Are some requirements more effective in terms of successful completion and preventing reconviction?
o Does the effectiveness of requirements vary by ethnicity and is this the same for men and women?
o Does unsuccessful completion due to failure to comply with the requirements of an order increase the likelihood of a custodial sentence for a
subsequent offence after termination of the order?
o Does the likelihood of a custodial sentence for a subsequent offence after breaching the requirements of an order vary by ethnicity and is
this the same for men and women?

The use of community sentences has declined considerably over the last decade. Over the same time-period the use of immediate custody has increased. This is concerning because community sentences can divert people from short custodial sentences. They have consistently been found to be superior to short prison sentences in preventing reconviction and are considerably less costly than custody. One of the reasons put forward for the decline of community sentences is a loss of confidence by magistrates that they are an effective alternative to custody and can reduce crime or rehabilitate offenders. Therefore, evidence on which community order requirements are most effective in this regard and for whom could potentially contribute to restoring confidence in their use.
The project will examine the extent to which ethnicity and gender differences in successful completion of community-based orders contribute to gender and ethnicity differences in the use of custody. A better understanding of the effectiveness of different order requirements for different groups of people could improve the use of community-based order requirements. This may help to keep people out of prison and reduce disparities between different groups of people in the use of custody, thereby improving fairness and legitimacy within the criminal justice system.
Results of the project will be presented in user-friendly reports on the ADR UK website, with an accompanying blog. There will also be a short video animation of the key findings which will be shown at the ESRC Festival of Social Science and will be available on the University of Sheffield's and ADR UK's web pages.
In addition the project will generate: a dataset which combines variables from the court, probation and prison datasets with derived variables, such as the number of subsequent convictions, which could be used by other researchers; and an offence severity scale which can be used by other researchers and also policy makers, in for example targeting resources.