Punishment is a grave intrusion into individual liberty, yet in most liberal criminal justice systems, including England and Wales, those punished are rarely directly engaged in determining their sentence. Consequently, the offender’s agency in respect of sentence—i.e. the offender’s capacity to play an active part in the sentencing process—is limited. Drawing on existing theories of punishment, the article argues that there may be justifications and scope for allowing offenders to exercise agency in a state-centred sentencing process, even though this scope is inevitably limited. It aims to develop a conceptual account of an ‘agentic’ sentencing system, arguing this should be based on the paradigm of a dialogue between the judge and offender. To preserve the state’s fundamental role in sentencing, constraints should be placed on the exercise of agency. The proposed model embodies a conception of sentencing as a decision-making process to be done with offenders, rather than to offenders. Nonetheless, while some objections can be rebutted, others demonstrate the gap between the theoretical ideal of respecting the offender’s agency at sentencing and how an agentic sentencing system might function in practice.

惩罚是对个人自由的严重侵犯，但在包括英格兰和威尔士在内的大多数自由刑事司法系统中，被惩罚者很少直接参与判决。因此，罪犯在量刑方面的代理权——即罪犯在量刑过程中发挥积极作用的能力——是有限的。文章借鉴现有的惩罚理论，认为允许罪犯在以国家为中心的量刑过程中行使代理权可能存在正当理由和范围，尽管该范围不可避免地受到限制。它旨在开发一个“代理”量刑系统的概念性解释，认为这应该基于法官与罪犯之间的对话范式。为了维护国家在量刑中的基本作用，应限制行使代理权。提议的模型体现了一种将量刑作为决策过程的概念。与罪犯，而不是对罪犯。尽管如此，虽然可以反驳一些反对意见，但其他反对意见表明在量刑时尊重罪犯的能动性的理论理想与代理量刑系统在实践中如何发挥作用之间存在差距。