SENTENCING IN CONTEXT: A MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS |
| |
| Authors: | JEFFERY T. ULMER BRIAN JOHNSON |
| |
| Affiliation: | Jeffery T. Ulmer is an associate professor of Sociology and Crime, Law, and Justice at Penn State University. His research interests include courts and sentencing, the sociology of criminal punishment, theories of crime and deviance, symbolic interactionism, and the integration of qualitative and quantitative methods. He is currently involved in a large quantitative and qualitative research project on federal case processing and sentencing in U.S. District Courts, funded by the National Science Foundation. In addition, he and Darrell Steffensmeier have recently written Confessions of a Dying Thief: Reflections on a Lifelong Criminal Career, published by Aldine de Gruyter (2004).;Brian D. Johnson is an assistant professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. His research interests include sentencing and corrections, racial and ethnic relations in society, and quantitative methods. Dr. Johnson is a Crawford Fellow who has recently received awards for his scholarship from both the American Sociological Association and the American Society of Criminology. His prior research has been published in Criminology and he is currently working on several articles as well as a book examining contextual effects in criminal sentencing. |
| |
| Abstract: | Criminal sentencing is, along with arresting and prosecuting, among the most important of formal social control decisions. In this study we use hierarchical modeling to test hypotheses about contextual level influences and cross level interaction effects on local court decisions. Most of the explanatory "action," our analysis shows, is at the individual case level in criminal sentencing. We also find evidence that local contextual features–such as court organizational culture, court caseload pressure, and racial and ethnic composition–affect sentencing outcomes, either directly or in interaction with individual factors. We conclude by discussing theoretical implications of our findings, and how our study points out some dilemmas among civil rights, local autonomy and organizational realities of criminal courts. |
| |
| Keywords: | sentencing courts social contexts race and ethnicity hierarchical modeling sentencing guidelines |
|
|
