Punishing Criminals is about sentencing theory and policy and the attempt to identify punishments other than imprisonment. Davies argues for the need to develop more credible and effective community-based intermediate sanctions that have the confidence of the public and the officials in the criminal system. He shows how focus groups can be used to improve the process of consultation. He sees the need to locate sentencing policy decisions within the wider context of the criminal justice process and presents empirical evidence from ten years study of the California criminal justice system. He sets out a denunciatory-retributive rationale for punishment which links sentencing aims with a community's confidence in different forms of punishment.

MALCOLM DAVIES, Professor of Penology in the Law School of Thames Valley University in London, has published a number of studies dealing with intermediate sanctions. He was a Senior Research Fellow in the Bureau of Criminal Statistics in California's Attorney General's Office and a visiting scholar at the University of California at Davis Law School and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, Berkeley.