Outside Remarks: Sentencing Between Expressive Justice and Aesthetic Injustice

This paper critically examines the form and function of sentencing remarks delivered in English criminal courts. Sentencing remarks are dominant cultural forms in the British social world and imagination. They are meant to perform and materialise ideas of justice, morality, law and order. They are also increasingly ubiquitous in the public sphere, widely reported by the media and, in recent years, being livestreamed through news channels and apps and made permanently available via Sky News – Courts’ dedicated YouTube channel. The many narratives contained in these remarks – about crime and punishment, right and wrong, responsibility and blame, violence and victimhood – are deemed to reflect largely held common senses and validated through the authority of legal reasoning and judicial actors and institutions. This paper proposes to unsettle the hegemonic position of these remarks, by exploring the extent to which their function as instruments of expressive justice (and, relatedly, moral communication) is undermined by the aesthetic injustice embedded within criminal justice institutions and practices. It does so by putting sentencing remarks in conversation with creative outputs produced by men and women at a series of writing workshops held in four English prisons.