SOME NEW EVIDENCE ON THE SERIOUSNESS OF CRIME*

Previous studies of the seriousness of crime have attempted to elicit information from public surveys. This paper reports on an alternative method of ranking the severity of crime. Actual victim injury rates are combined with jury awards in personal injury accident cases to estimate pain, suffering, and fear. Crime-related death rates are combined with estimates of the value of life to arrive at monetary values for the risk of death. These estimates are combined with out-of-pocket costs (such as medical costs and lost wages) to arrive at total dollar estimates of the cost of individual crimes to victims. These dollar estimates are then used to rank the seriousness of crimes. Although these two approaches yield surprisingly similar rankings, the monetary estimates indicate that violent crimes are relatively more costly to victims than survey results might imply.     

Prosecutorial discretion to defer criminalization: The effects of defendant's ascribed and achieved status characteristics

This research contributes to a further understanding of prosecutorial discretion by exploring tenets of casual attribution theory and etiology of bias theory as each informs an uncertainty avoidance perspective on the prosecutor's decision to divert felony drug defendants from criminal prosecution and into a treatment program. The sociolegal consequences of the exercise of this early screening decision are expressed by both conflict theorists and labeling theorists. Our analysis involves estimating main effects and interaction effects of defendant ascribed status and achieved status on the likelihood of diversion. The findings indicate partial support for hypotheses derived, from the theoretical perspectives pursued. In addition these findings point to a more complex model of the subjective nature of the exercise of prosecutorial discretion, a model that benefits from understanding the salience of minimizing uncertainty in the decision to criminals.