ABSTRACT
Criminal violence in England and Wales is in decline and has been since the mid-1990s. Punishment of violent offenders became substantially harsher over that period. The parts of Justice for All, the White Paper, that deal with violent crimes read like and are afterthoughts, appended for the most part to political and policy worries about serious sexual crimes involving children. However, the portions of the Criminal Justice Act that deal with ‘dangerous’ offenders, though not without some subtlety, lack restraint and could easily result in harsh and unjustly severe punishments of offenders who aren’t dangerous at all.
