Personal statement

Professor Cyrus Tata, PhD, FRSA is Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at Strathclyde University Law School, where he is Director of the Centre for Law, Crime and Justice, and programme director of the LLM / MSc in Criminal Justice & Penal Change. For over twenty-five years he has conducted and published research into various aspects of criminal justice in Scotland and abroad, including: the impact of legal aid reforms, plea decision-making and plea negotiation, lawyer-client relations, the role of pre-sentence reports, mitigation and individualisation, sentencing, executive release decision-making, and the use of information technology (including, for example, the introduction of a Sentencing Information System for the High Court). Regularly invited to speak to policy and practice audiences at home and around the world, for example, he is currently giving a series of public lectures on sustainable ways of reducing the use of imprisonment. He is also founder and chair of the European Group on Sentencing and Penal Decision-Making (a network of academic, policy and practice members in over 25 countries). He has also served as adviser to governments in several countries, for example recently to the senior judiciary and court service of the Irish Republic, and is currently assisting Northern Ireland’s Review of Sentencing Policy. He is also currently working, (with partners in Sweden, Italy and the USA), on an EU-funded research study into Emotions in the criminal process. He is also co-author of several studies into public views about and knowledge of sentencing. The research includes the experiences of victim/survivor experiences in sexual offence cases, and those of bereaved families in cases of death by driving offences. In 2017 he was invited and elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Prof Tata's new book 'Sentencing: A Social Process - Rethinking Research & Policy' was published in 2020 to wide international acclaim.