ABSTRACT
This chapter provides qualitative analysis of Social Inquiry Reports (SIR) content in order to examine whether there were different messages being conveyed to sentencers about defendants according to the ethnicity of the defendant. The model most frequently employed seemed to be that of studying SIRs and forming an impressionistic assessment of the content and tone of the reports. The chapter examines the issue of the way information in SIRs was received a two-pronged system of analysis was designed the first to concentrate on the language used by SIR authors to describe the characteristics of the defendant and the second related to causal factors of offending identified by authors. The qualitative analysis was based on a sample of 123 SIRs drawn from the total of 186 reports that were presented to the court during the year representing 66% of all reports prepared. Analysis of the reports on the basis of the ethnicity of the defendant revealed some interesting similarities and differences.
