Guides

• How the guidelines work: offence level, criminal history category, the sentencing table, and what departures and variances are.
• What the Commission's datafile does and does not include: which cases are counted, what is missing, and how life and time-served sentences are recorded.
• Why medians: why the median prison term, not the average, is the headline figure on every page.

See also the methodology for the exact variables and rules used.