COURT COMMUNITIES UNDER SENTENCING GUIDELINES: DILEMMAS OF FORMAL RATIONALITY AND SENTENCING DISPARITY

Efforts to structure sentencing through guidelines involve a fundamental dilemma for the sociology of law—guidelines attempt to emphasize formal rationality and uniformity (Savelsberg, 1992) while allowing discretion to tailor sentences to fit situations and characteristics of individual defendants when courts deem it warranted (substantive rationality). This exercise of substantive rationality in sentencing based on "extralegal" criteria deemed relevant by local court actors risks the kind of unwarranted disparity that guidelines were intended to reduce. We view local courts as arenas in which two sets of sentencing standards meet—formal rational ones articulated by guidelines vs. substantive, extralegal criteria deemed relevant by local court actors. We use statistical and qualitative data from Pennsylvania, a state whose courts have operated under sentencing guidelines for over a decade. Our analysis examines extralegal differences in three county courts' sentencing outcomes, and then documents ways in which substantive rational sentencing criteria are intertwined with defendants' exercise of their right to trial and their race and gender.     

REVIEW ESSAY:

The Social Contexts of Criminal Sentencing by Martha A. Myers and Susette Talarico.
Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System by Joan Petersilia.
The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System by William Wilbanks.     

SCALE ECONOMIES AND IRON LAWS: MERGERS AND DEMERGERS IN WHITEHALL 1971–1984

Between 1971 and 1984 there were ten cases of merger or demerger in British central government departments, ranging in importance from the massive DTI demerger into four distinct departments (1973) to the absorption by the Lord Chancellor's Department of the Office of the Public Trustee (1982). By analysis of changes in aggregate indices of 'top staff', 'middle staff', ratio of administrative grades to total staff, salary costs relative to total budget, budget relative to total Government budget, and staff relative to total Civil Service staff, some common hypotheses about the rationale and effects of such bureau-shuffling are explored. It is found that, if anything, like attracts unlike (in terms of these indices); that change in scale creates neither economies nor diseconomies; that reorganization does not inevitably produce cost escalation (the 'Iron Law of Prodigality'); but that the 'Iron Law of Inertia' (reorganization in practice has little observable effect on bureaucratic structure and working) is supported by the observed results.     

TANGLED WEBS? MANAGING LOCAL MIXED ECONOMIES OF CARE

This article addresses two main issues about the emergent forms of social care provision in the development of a more mixed economy of welfare in Britain in the 1990s. The first concerns patterns of inter-organizational relationship within local mixed economies of care, paying particular attention to the inter-section of competitive and collaborative models of such relationships. The second concerns the emergence of a'managerial mode of co-ordination'as the dominant force in ordering intra- and inter-organizational relationships in such mixed economies. The article draws on research conducted in two such local mixed economies of care and addresses some of the theoretical problems involved in trying to analyse these new patterns of relationship.