ABSTRACT
Do nations, or states or provinces within nations, differ in the severity of their sentencing policies and practices? This apparently simple question has proved to be surprisingly difficult to answer. Although there is much speculation and a great deal of estimation, cross-jurisdictional comparisons of sentence severity have been few and their findings relatively narrow and inconclusive. To some degree, this is not surprising, as international criminal justice data are rarely completely comparable and there are even significant variations between jurisdictions within federalised nations. The effort of obtaining and standardising the data is rarely thought worthwhile: most countries tend to be juricentric and their criminal justice systems solipsistic.
