Related Publications
Public Opinion and Sentencing
One of the Council's primary functions is to gauge public opinion on sentencing matters. The Council is currently reviewing the existing research literature on public opinion and sentencing as a first step towards understanding how it might appropriately gauge public opinion, and on which issues.
While there is an extensive body of research on public opinion on a variety of sentencing matters in the international literature, there is a lack of information about the perceptions of the public in Australia. The Council has released a research paper, Myths and Misconceptions: Public Opinion versus Public Judgment about Sentencing, that considers the development of a suite of methodological tools for measuring public opinion in order to address this significant gap.