The place of public fear in sentencing and correctional policy

Public opinion about sentencing and correctional issues has emerged in recent decades as a salient topic in criminology. Empirical studies have suggested that the public has dynamic perceptions about these criminal justice issues. Sentencing and correctional policy have become key issues confronting legislators and policymakers, as correctional budgets and public interest in these areas have increased. Despite the focus on public opinion about sentencing and corrections, previous research has largely ignored how the public feels about the role of policymakers regarding these issues, and what influences opinions about whether public fear should be an important consideration in policy decisions. The current study partly replicated the work of Cullen and colleagues by examining perceptions of crime salience, crime causation, goals of the criminal justice system, and attitudes towards imprisonment and rehabilitation. It uniquely examined perceptions about the importance of legislator consideration of a specific determinant, namely, public fear, in decision making about sentencing and correctional policy.     

Crime,time, and punishment: An exploration of selection bias in sentencing research

The sentencing decision reflects the culmination of a long series of processing and, thus, selection decisions, with cases leaving the system at each decision point. Accordingly, the substantive implications of bias due to sample selection are of particular concern for sentencing research. In an effort to assess the existence and manifestations of selection bias, the sentencing decision is modeled for three samples, each of which was selected from different stages of the justice process. Event-history data on felony arrests in the State of California over a 3-year period are used, along with a relatively simple analytic technique which reduces such bias. Results indicate that biasis introduced when censored observations are excluded from the analyses. Also, the effects of certain exogenous variables on sentence length differ, depending upon the selection criteria. Of these, the influence of pleading guilty rather than going to trial is especially interesting. Overall, our findings are consistent with the possibility that selectivity bias has concealed effects of sentence bargaining in some earlier studies.The data utilized in this study were collected and made available by the State of California Department of Justice, Bureau of Criminal Statistics. The Department of Justice bears no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here.     

Why public opinion changes: the implications for health and health policy

Research on stasis or change in public opinion toward health, health policy, and medical care tends to focus on short-term dynamics and to emphasize the impact of discrete messages communicated by individual speakers in particular situations. This focus on what we term "situational framing," though valuable in some respects, is poorly equipped to assess changes that may occur over the longer term. We focus, instead, on "structural framing" to understand how institutionalized public health and health care policies impact public opinion and behavior over time. Understanding the dynamics of public opinion over time is especially helpful in tracking the political effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 as it moves from the debate over its passage to its implementation and operation.     

公众舆论对公共政策的影响述评

公众舆论是公众以内心深处的政治文化价值体系为标准,并经一定渠道由公众自主表达的对当前政治事务和公共政策的意见。公众舆论关注的焦点是公共政策的制定和执行。公众关注的程度越高．表明公众参与的热情越高，对公共政策的影响也就越大。公众舆论对公共政策的影响主要体现在内容、形式、功能和实践四个方面。     

Sentencing in a free society: The failure of the President's Crime Commission to influence sentencing policy

The President's Crime Commission (1965–1967) made recommendations in corrections favoring the then leading ideas of rehabilitation and indeterminacy, shortly before a radical reappraisal led to the eclipse of the rehabilitative model in favor of “just deserts.” In coming to its conclusions, the Commission overlooked the potential growth of prison populations, the development of prisoners' rights, and research that pointed to the failure of rehabilitation. The inability of the Commission to anticipate this great change was due in part to the dynamics of and time pressures on a Presidential commission. The change was precipitated by a social and intellectual crisis analogous to “scientific paradigm” revolutions described by Thomas Kuhn (1970). The crisis that led to a change in thinking about punishment was part of the larger crisis of the political legitimacy of liberalism.     

Judicial discretion and sentencing disparity in adult felony courts in Israel

This study focuses on a series of legal, extralegal, and systemic variables presumed to affect the workings of criminal-justice systems. These variables are employed first to analyze the decision of the court to refer defendants for presentence investigation when such a referral is not mandatory, then to examine how these referrals, once made, influence disposition. The relationship of legal representation to disposition is also explored.The findings contradict conventional wisdom regarding the advantages to defendants of legal representation and of presentence reports. Lawyers do not appear to influence either referral or sentencing. The presentence reports are requested by judges seeking to individualize their sentencing decisions, but this process of individualization is as likely to result in harsher sentences as in greater leniency.     

Policy feedback and public opinion: the role of employer responsibility in social policy

This study extends the literature on policy feedback and explores the extent to which public attitudes reflect learning from past government initiatives. We analyze the ways in which feedback mechanisms affecting public attitudes may differ from those earlier identified in the literature. We apply this general analytic framework to help explain variation in public attitudes toward private employer involvement in health care, explore possible causal pathways, and offer some preliminary empirical tests of these hypotheses. There are different levels of public support for the notion of employer obligation involving medical care, long-term care, and the treatment of substance abuse. Our evidence suggests that lessons about the performance of institutions in each of these policy domains represent the most important effect of existing policy on public attitudes. Furthermore, these differences correspond to what one would expect based on our model of policy feedback and cannot be explained by other plausible sources of policy legitimacy.     

Institutionalizing inequality in the courts: Decomposing racial and ethnic disparities in detention,conviction, and sentencing*

A significant body of literature has examined racial and ethnic inequalities in sentencing, focusing on how individual court actors make decisions, but fewer scholars have examined whether disparities are institutionalized through legal case factors. After finding racial and ethnic inequalities in pretrial detention, conviction, and incarceration based on 4 years of felony court data (N = 83,924) from Miami-Dade County, we estimate nonlinear decomposition models to examine how much of the inequalities are explained by differences in criminal history, charging, and for conviction and incarceration, pretrial detention. Results suggest that inequality is greatest between White non-Latinos and Black Latinos, followed by White non-Latinos and Black non-Latinos, ranging from 4 to more than 8 percentage points difference in the probability of pretrial detention, 7–13 points difference in conviction, 5–6 points in prison, and 4–10 points difference in jail. We find few differences between White non-Latinos and White Latinos. Between half and three-quarters of the inequality in pretrial detention, conviction, and prison sentences between White non-Latino and Black people is explained through legal case factors. Our findings indicate that inequality is, in part, institutionalized through legal case factors, suggesting these factors are not “race neutral” but instead racialized and contribute to inequalities in court outcomes.     

Sex effects and sentencing: An analysis of the statistical literature

The violent victimization of medical patients resulting from reckless or negligent physician care has traditionally remained beyond the reach of the criminal law. The professional nature of the doctor-patient relationship, as well as the existence of civil and peer-initiated sanctions, has insulated doctors from criminal prosecution. The purpose of our research is to examine whether this traditional immunity remains intact or has been breached. As a prelude to this analysis, we identify several factors which, when considered together, indicate physicians' increasing vulnerability to criminal prosecution. We present the results of a search conducted to identify cases involving the criminal prosecution of physician violence, and we examine the cases in terms of several characteristics that marked the prosecutions. Our results suggest that we may be witnessing the beginning of the use of the criminal sanction against physician violence.     

Sentence disparity in the federal courts and the adoption of sentencing guidelines

Pressure in the 1970's to reform the sentencing process can be attributed to a change in perceived public sentiment regarding the utility of treatment and to the belief that sentencing disparity was a severe problem in the sentencing process. Primary reform occurred in the federal judicial system with the development and implementation of rigorous sentencing guidelines. An evaluation of sentencing patterns for one federal judicial district indicates that sentencing disparity was not severe. Most federal offenders are relatively mild and consistently receive relatively mild sentences.     

Penal ideology, sentencing and the legitimacy of trial justice

The paper explores the link between penal ideology and international trial justice from the perspective of sentencing. The argument is based on the premise that the perceived legitimacy of punishment is directly related to effective governance in criminal justice. As such, loss of faith, or lack of moral empathy by individuals and communities with the ideologies, processes and outcomes of punishment compromises the ability of criminal trials to function effectively in maintaining the ‘rule of law’. The paper argues that more emphasis should be given explaining the moral foundations that underpin perceptions of ‘justice’ in sociological accounts of the ‘reality’ of sentencing, and proposes an analytical framework for conceptualising this. Adopting this approach, the paper draws on examples from national and international criminal justice to illustrate how the hegemony of penal ideology and its implementation compromises the ability of sentencing outcomes to resonate with the trial‘s ‘relevant audience’. The paper then focuses on how penal ideology influences the construction of the factual basis for sentencing in international criminal trials, and considers the consequences of this for the perceived ‘legitimacy’ of international trial justice.     

Sentencing Guidelines and focal concerns: The effect of sentencing policy as a practical constraint on sentencing decisions

Contemporary research on criminal sentencing has analyzed sentencing under numerous sentencing policies, yet the effect of sentencing policy on outcomes and disparity is not known. A variety of sentencing guidelines systems, one of the more common sentencing policies, exists throughout the country. In addition, recent Supreme Court decisions regarding sentencing guidelines are likely to produce alterations to several state sentencing policies over the next few years. Using data from the state of Florida, the current study examines the effects of policy transformation on sentencing disparity within the focal concerns of sentencing perspective. The authors view sentencing guidelines as a practical constraint on sentencing decisions that influence other key variables. The results indicate that sentencing policy transformation has an important effect on both sentencing decisions and on the factors that shape those decisions. The findings suggest that future sentencing research and theoretical development would benefit from incorporating measures of policy differences in its analyses.     

Obesity, courts, and the new politics of public health

Health care politics are changing. They increasingly focus not on avowedly public projects (such as building the health care infrastructure) but on regulating private behavior. Examples include tobacco, obesity, abortion, drug abuse, the right to die, and even a patient's relationship with his or her managed care organization. Regulating private behavior introduces a distinctive policy process; it alters the way we introduce (or frame) political issues and shifts many important decisions from the legislatures to the courts. In this article, we illustrate the politics of private regulation by following a dramatic case, obesity, through the political process. We describe how obesity evolved from a private matter to a political issue. We then assess how different political institutions have responded and conclude that courts will continue to take the leading role.     

News media influences on public views of sentencing

Opinion polls in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and elsewhere suggest that most members of the public would like their criminal courts to be harsher. Does media coverage of criminal sentencing contribute to a preference for harsher sentencing? Most people derive their information about sentencing from the news media and content analyses of news stories in Canada and the United States demonstrate that crimes of violence and sentences of imprisonment are overrepresented. Moreover, the news media provide little systematic information about the sentencing process or its underlying principles. This article reports the results of three studies examining the effects of media coverage on public opinion about sentencing. Subjects who read actual newspaper stories about sentencing that appeared in Canadian newspapers rated most reported sentences as too lenient. However, the specific account they read influenced their leniency judgments. Furthermore, in one experiment, participants assigned to read a newspaper account of a sentencing decision supported harsher sentences than participants who read a summary of actual court documents from the sentencing hearing.     

Crime prevention participation:An exploratory analysis

Most past research on crime and crime prevention has focused on their occurrence in urban settings. Relatively little attention has been given to crime and citizen crime prevention in small town/rural areas. The present study uses secondary data from the National Crime Survey: Victim Risk Supplement, 1983 to investigate citizen participation in five crime prevention domains within large urban areas and small town/rural areas. The results suggest that, while there are some similarities in citizen participation, various factors have different degrees of impact in different locations. Further, differences in crime prevention participation are more a function of the type of crime prevention than of the size of the local population.