Jose Pina-Sánchez 🇪🇺

Also, the Sentencing Council's guidelines have improved between court consistency, sentencingcouncil.org.uk/media/5hwpk2... which was already pretty high, and there is indirect evidence they have contributed to reduce ethnic disparities in sentencing: www.northumbriajournals.co.uk/index.php/jl...

A much bigger failure in my view was their inability to keep sentence inflation in check for the 14 years they were in power.

Yes, but suspended sentences are not used to calculate the increase in custodial sentence length, which for indictable sentences has been huge
www.sentencingacademy.org.uk/wp-content/u...
On early releases emergency decisions like the 'Standard Determinate Sentence 40%' have been adopted recently.

"The public are sick of voting for tougher sentences and getting the opposite."
www.theguardian.com/law/2025/oct...
To put it mildly, Robert Jenrick is a complete imbecile who does not know what he is talking about:
www.sentencingacademy.org.uk/wp-content/u...

"For too long, we have outsourced how we define prestige to the indexers and specifically the impact factor. This has created a system in which the need to get published in prestigious journals creates bad incentives for authors to inflate their findings to tell a good story."

To hell with impact factors and citation counts, if you want to figure out how good is a journal or a researcher just read them.

Yet another problem for scholarly communication in criminology: The case of a Spanish journal turned into a paper mill Founded in 1999, RECPC became one of the most influential Spanish-language journals in criminal law and criminology. After a 2024 change of management, articles of dubious authorship and quality linke...

Short note with Fernando Miró Llinares published on @crimrxiv.com: 'Yet another problem for scholarly communication in criminology: The case of a Spanish journal turned into a paper mill'
doi.org/10.21428/cb6...

What would you do if you saw harassment in your local park? 🌳

Harassment in parks and public spaces is a key safety concern for women and girls — and park staff are often the first to witness or respond.

🧵 (1/6)

President Macron: “Europeans, let's wake up!

We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks.”

defenddemocracy.eu/macron-democ...

Hello! ENOC is on BlueSky now. We are a working group of the @esc-eurocrim.bsky.social dedicated to the promotion, training, application and rewarding of open research in criminology. Check out our website for more: esc-enoc.github.io

@opencriminology.bsky.social 👋

Most quantitative research that is not preregistered is actually inductive/exploratory. We just keep lying to ourselves.

I genuinely thought that having a Uni of Leeds graduate as PM would be great news for us.

The defining characteristics of the previous 14 years of Tory rule, now served on a red tray.

Why this hate towards less prestigious universities though?
It is incredibly irrational.
Is it due to a inferiority complex (they never made it to uni)? Or perhaps the opposite, pure classism from Oxbridge graduates?

These idiots have no idea how important universities are to the modern British economy and the towns and cities in which they are based.

On average, a British university returns £14 for every £1 of public investment. So yes, let's slaughter these golden geese and scorch our economy.

As a methods man you should know that running the necessary focus groups to figure out his appropriate response takes time.

the brilliant @zoejardiniere.bsky.social is on my podcast next week and her command of basic but essential facts, such as this is really worth tuning in for.

The @elegraph Farage claims migrants are eating swans in Royal Parks Reform UK leader's accusations immediately rebuffed by Royal Parks charity IBC

I’ve heard it say that Nigel Farage has no less than seventeen nipples spread over his chest and back.

I’m, of course, not saying it’s true, but we have no evidence saying otherwise.

It could be true, we just don’t know.

That’s how this works, right?

Keir Starmer’s spokesperson asked for the PM's response to Nigel Farage’s plan to deport hundreds of thousands of people living and working completely legally in the UK, replies that he thinks it is “unworkable” and “unfunded”.

So his objection is that they’ve got their sums wrong

Lohrs book on sampling is a true gem.

We're excited to launch a major #SaferParks: #StandUpAgainstStreetHarassment campaign in partnership with @suzylamplughtrust.bsky.social @keepbritaintidy.bsky.social #GreenFlagAward to build a community of active bystanders and make our parks safer, more inclusive spaces for all

UK could raise nearly £2bn by taxing SUVs in line with European countries, study shows Thinktank says an ‘SUV loophole’ means UK buyers pay up to 20 times less tax on biggest models than in neighbouring nations

UK could raise £2bn by taxing SUVs in line with European countries.

Why do so many people want giant SUVs? They damage roads, create more pollution, cause more serious injuries and take up bigger parking spaces.

UK buyers pay 20 times less tax than in other European countries.

Tax them.

New short piece on the European Network for Open Criminology site with Torbjørn Skardhamar:
Reduce the Costs and Increase the Benefits of Open Science
esc-enoc.github.io/how-to/cost-...

This is really good (only got up to the introduction, but will definitely finish it later).
Perhaps the author should consider submitting it to the BJC.

"And I would have got away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids": Experimentally falsifying Ghost Criminology Ghost criminology contends that places scarred by crime and atrocity emit a “spectral residue” that affects visitors to that site. To test whether unease stems from physical settings or from the…

A masterclass in how to test a theory, using the example of 'ghost criminology' (a reasonable idea hiding behind a silly name and a huge amount of waffle). The end result being the theory isn't supported by experimental evidence.

doi.org/10.21428/cb6...

To contextualize this week’s political commentary, of the 2,647 identified extremist violent offenders in the US since 2000, far-right extremists were more than 7 times more represented in the data than far-left extremists.

* No, this isn’t to negate the abhorrent shooting this week.

It is no exaggeration to say that at this point it is either social media or democracy.

It’s hard work, invites criticism, does not draw citations (especially if the time invested is instead dedicated to writing more papers). While senior academics, who ought to lead the way, for the most part neither care nor engage.

Tile chart showing 36 barriers to practicing open science, grouped by barrier type and by open science practice. The five barrier categories, based on National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2018), are: costs and infrastructure (3 barriers); structure of scholarly communications (8); lack of supportive culture, incentives, and training (15); privacy, security, and proprietary barriers to sharing (8); and (intra)disciplinary differences (2). Barriers are also grouped by nine open science practices: publishing open access (4 barriers), publishing preprints (5), sharing open code (4), sharing open data (6), sharing open materials (2), conducting open peer review (4), using open source software (4), pre-registering research (3), and disclosing contribution roles (4).

Researchers often perceive 'barriers' to practicing #OpenScience, whether it’s publishing open access, sharing data, or pre-registering studies.

Last week at @esc-eurocrim.bsky.social, I presented our work at NSCR identifying 36 such distinct barriers.

Do you recognize them in your own work?