Examining Sentencing Patterns and Outcomes for White-Collar and Property Crime Offenders

Guided by the focal concerns perspective, the authors examine effects associated with sentencing predictors on incarceration and sentence length decisions for offenders convicted of white-collar and different forms of property crime. Using seven years of data (2004–2010) obtained from the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, the authors compare direct and interaction effects of legal and extralegal covariates for white-collar, property economic, and property noneconomic offenders to assess similarities and differences in sentencing outcomes across these crime types. Results indicate more variation exists between white-collar and property noneconomic offenders, particularly in terms of age, race, and gender interaction effects on sentence length decisions. Substantive and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Pretexts and US foreign policy: the war on terrorism in historical perspective

This article analyzes the way that US foreign policy élites have used pretexts to manage public opinion. Policymakers, it is argued, often seize upon threatening external events, and use these events to create a favorable political climate in which to “sell” policies of militarization and external expansion to the public. The article argues that the Bush administration has used the threat of terrorism as a pretext to implement a wide range of policies that had been decided upon in advance of the 9/11 attacks. It also argues that the recent uses of pretexts by the Bush administration have strong historical precedents: extended case studies of pretexts are presented for the events surrounding the Korea crisis of 1950 and the Afghanistan crisis of 1979–1980, as well as the more recent War on Terrorism.