ABSTRACT
Sentencing is the decision of what to do with the person convicted of a criminal offense. Traditionally, our society has responded to criminality by imposing a punishment on the criminal. von Hirsch defined criminal punishment as “the infliction by the state of consequences normally considered unpleasant, on a person in response to his having been convicted of a crime” (1976, p. 34). For our purposes, then, criminal punishment is the purposeful infliction of pain on a person as a result of a criminal conviction.
