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In Search of Proportionate Sentencing

2025· book-chapter· en· W4406106875 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Anthony N. Doob, Jane B. Sprott

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCriminal Justice and Corrections Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCriminologyComputer sciencePsychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This chapter examines a sentencing concept that Julian V Roberts has addressed in a large number of publications in the past forty years or so: proportionality. It first examines the efforts that Roberts and others have made to try to find mechanisms to give weight to an offender’s criminal record in a manner that does not undermine proportionality. Second, the chapter examines the Canadian ‘conditional sentence of imprisonment’ (a version of the suspended sentence) suggesting that its inadequate legislative framing in Canada reflected the fact that its real purpose was only to reduce the use of imprisonment. In both of these areas, any attempt to come up with clever ways of maintaining the pretence that sentences are proportional may be futile. For example, since criminal records vary on a large number of dimensions, some of which will affect the manner in which a sentence is served, it may be impossible, at sentencing, to go beyond a general statement related to the importance of proportionality and an indication that sentences can be affected by criminal records. Similarly, a broad statement saying that all sentences—custodial, suspended, and community—should be roughly proportionate to the severity of the offence may be all that can be meaningfully stated.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.010
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.035
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.018
Threshold uncertainty score0.060

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0100.035
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0020.003
Scholarly communication0.0030.005
Open science0.0020.003
Research integrity0.0010.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0180.003

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.036
GPT teacher head0.337
Teacher spread0.301 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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