Many of the developments in punishment systems in the 1980s took societies such as England and Wales further along the continuum towards Weber's ideal type of a modern, bureaucratic society. Changes in the grant¬ing of parole, the dissemination of sentencing guidelines, and the move to make sentencing more predictably correlated with the seriousness of the offence (Ashworth 1989) all pointed in this direction of making criminal justice more rational in the bureaucratic sense: more firmly tied to the following of rules and precedents, less open to individual assessment of circumstances of cases.