IMAGES OF DANGER AND CULPABILITY: RACIAL STEREOTYPING,CASE PROCESSING,AND CRIMINAL SENTENCING*

In this paper we argue that the meaning of race in criminal justice decision making will vary depending on other offender and offense characteristics, and that differences in treatment within races may therefore be as large as differences between races. We find that, among adult drug offenders from Washington State, those white offenders who most closely resemble the stereotype of a dangerous drug offender receive significantly harsher treatment than other white offending groups, while among black offenders, it is the defendants who least resemble a dangerous drug offender who receive substantially different—in this case, less punitive—treatment than other black offenders. That is, the exceptions are made for the most serious and the least serious offenders. We discuss the implications of these findings.     

Inside Moves and Outside Views: An Australian Case Study of Elite and Public Perceptions of Political Corruption

The search for a definition of political corruption that adequately captures the nuances of governmental activity has been a long one. This article defends social or attitudinal definitions of corruption against some recent criticisms. It examines the value of Arnold Heidenheimer's widely cited distinctions among "black,""gray," and "white" corruption using empirical evidence from an interview study of over 100 Australian politicians and 500 voters. The results show that the broad dimensions of corruption — the official, the donor, the payoff, and the favor — identified by John Peters and Susan Welch affect the views of both politicians and voters alike.
Nonetheless, elites and the public come to judgments from different perspectives, and they judge some acts differently. Put another way, some corruption is gray. Politicians judge actions more subtly than do voters, who are more likely to see corruption in all acts. As Michael Johnston has suggested, the different experiences of political insiders and outsiders explain this disparity in their moral outlooks. Insiders are socialized to see at least some actions as functional and therefore not corrupt. Outsiders, unaware of the insiders' rules, tend to judge political action by moral absolutes. Thus the structure of liberal democratic government contributes to conflicting elite and public views of political right and wrong.     

MODELING THE EFFECTS OF LEGALLY RELEVANT AND EXTRALEGAL FACTORS UNDER SENTENCING GUIDELINES: THE RULES HAVE CHANGED*

Studies of sentencing in jurisdictions with sentencing guidelines have generally failed to specify adequately the effects of offense seriousness and criminal history—the principal factors that, by law, should determine sentencing decisions. As a result, the explanatory power of those models is seriously limited, and regression coefficients representing both legal and extralegal factors may be biased. We present an alternative approach to specify more precisely the effects of legally relevant factors on sentencing outcomes and test the approach using felony sentencing data from Washington State. We find that controlling for the presumptive sentence substantially improves the fit and explanatory power of models predicting sentencing decisions, and that the estimated effects of extralegal factors, specifically sex and race, reduce considerably. The findings have both substantive and methodological implications.     

Bringing the Sociology of Media Back In

In political communication research, news media tend to be studied more as a dependent than independent variable. That is, few studies link structural characteristics of media systems to the production of journalistic discourse about politics. One reason for this relative silence is the inadequacy of prevalent theories. Influential scholars in sociology and political communication such as Jürgen Habermas, Manuel Castells, and William Gamson provide only sketchy, institutionally underspecified accounts of media systems. Likewise, models in the sociology of news have tended to either aggregate societal level influences (chiefly political and economic) that are analytically and often empirically quite distinct or overemphasize micro-level influences (news routines, bureaucratic pressures). In between such micro- and macro-influences, the mezzo-level "journalistic field" represents an important shaping factor heretofore largely ignored. As path-dependent institutional logics, fields help ground cultural analysis; as interorganizational spatial environments varying in their level of concentration, they explain heretofore undertheorized aspects of news production. Drawing on the sociology of news and field theory (Bourdieu and American new institutionalism), this essay offers a series of hypotheses about how variable characteristics of media systems shape news discourse. Since variation at the system level is most clearly seen via cross-national comparative studies, international research is best positioned to build more generalizable theory about the production of journalistically mediated political discourse.     

DISCRETION AND DISPARITY UNDER SENTENCING GUIDELINES: THE ROLE OF DEPARTURES AND STRUCTURED SENTENCING ALTERNATIVES*

This article examines the use of alternative sentencing provisions as mechanisms for departing from sentencing guidelines in Washington State and as structural sources of unwarranted sentencing disparity. The authors argue that these structural features of guidelines not only serve as “windows of discretion” through which disparities arise, but they also may encourage disparities by requiring consideration of substantive criteria that disadvantage certain offender groups. The analyses find that males and minority offenders are less likely to receive alternative sentences below the standard range, but that race‐ethnicity and gender have inconsistent effects on departures above the standard range. Theoretical implications of the study are discussed.