The scholarly literature on sentencing reform has largely overlooked the African continent. The paucity of legal scholarship is particularly striking with respect to Tanzania, one of Africa's largest and most populous countries. This article explores the first significant sentencing reform in Tanzania's history. In 2020, the Tanzanian judiciary issued a comprehensive set of sentencing guidelines for courts to follow. Until this point, sentencing was a highly discretionary stage of the criminal process, and the Tanzanian penal code offered very little guidance with respect to the exercise of that discretion. After providing a brief summary of the new sentencing regime, we explore the innovative guidance contained in the reforms. In the conclusion we discuss the extent to which the Tanzanian reforms reflect core African values of Ubuntu, or more specifically in the case of Tanzania, Ujamaa, the philosophy popularized by Tanzania's first president, Julius Nyerere.

Popular attitudes towards crime in Latin America induce local legislators to support harsh sentencing frameworks. What, therefore, explains the adoption of non-prison sentences across the region? Using Brazil as a case study, this article claims that sentencing reform is a consequence of the growing autonomy of bureaucrats who manage the criminal justice system. Insulated from patronage networks and granted broad mandates to pursue solutions to pressing penal crises, these policy elites use their position in the state to develop new rules and facilitate their approval despite popular opposition to measures that limit the state's punitive capacity. The findings point to the importance of bureaucratic autonomy for the enactment of policies that can benefit the underprivileged but do not enjoy widespread support from voters.

In 2012 the Knesset approved a new sentencing law. Israel thus became the latest jurisdiction to introduce statutory directions for courts to follow in sentencing. The approach of the United States to structuring judicial discretion often entails the use of a sentencing grid with presumptive sentencing ranges. In contrast, the Sentencing Act of Israel reflects a less prescriptive method: it provides guidance by words rather than numbers. Retributivism is clearly identified as the penal philosophy underpinning the new law, which takes a novel approach to promoting more proportionate sentencing. Courts are directed to construct an individualised proportionate sentencing range appropriate to the case in hand. Once this is established, the court then follows additional directions regarding factors and principles related to sentencing. Although other jurisdictions have placed the purposes and principles of sentencing on a statutory footing, this is the first such legislative declaration in Israel. The statute also contains a methodology to implement a proportional approach to sentencing as well as detailed guidance on sentencing factors. This article describes and explores the new Sentencing Act, making limited comparisons to sentencing reforms in other jurisdictions – principally England and Wales, New Zealand and the United States. In concluding, we speculate on the likely consequences of the law: will it achieve the goals of promoting more consistent and principled sentencing?