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.     

PEER GROUP SUPPORT FOR POLICE OCCUPATIONAL DEVIANCE

Although there have been several journalistic and impressionistic accounts of police corrupt behavior, there are few empirical studies of this phenomenon. One of the reasons for this lack of research is the absence of theoretical frames of reference to guide research endeavors. This paper deals with police corruption as but one of many forms of occupational deviance and discusses the manner in which the social conditions existing within the occupational milieu contribute to such corruption. In particular. the paper examines the manner in which the opportunity structure and socialization practices within the occupation combine with peer group support to create a social situation where certain corrupt acts are tolerated and accepted.     

DEVIANT PLACES: A THEORY OF THE ECOLOGY OF CRIME

It is well known that high rates of crime and deviance can persist in specific neighborhoods despite repeated, complete turnovers in the composition of their populations. That this occurs suggests that more than "kinds of people" explanations are needed to account for the ecological concentration of deviance—that we also need to develop "kinds of places" explanations. This essay attempts to codify more than a century of ecological research on crime and deviance into an integrated set of 30 propositions and offers these as a first approximation of a theory of deviant places.     

BUREAUCRACY TRIUMPHANT OR DENIED? THE EXPANSION OF THE BRITISH CIVIL SERVICE, 1919–1939

The power of central government in Britain increased significantly in the inter-war period, but did Britain become bureaucratic? This article examines the expansion of the civil service as a whole through a detailed case study of one particular department (the Ministry of Labour) in the light of traditional critiques of bureaucracy. It concludes that previous over-concentration on the role of the Treasury has distorted analysis. The inter-war civil service became bureaucratic in terms not of rationality, inefficiency or power but only of size and increasing complexity. In this it reflected a general trend in British society, which also affected industry and the trade union movement.     

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.