Recent Developments and New Directions in Sentencing Research

Abstract

Research on criminal sentencing, particularly on various types of disparity therein, has been an active field of inquiry for decades. This paper provides a conceptual survey of research on non-capital sentencing outcomes since 2000. I first look backward at the research agenda posed by reviews in the early 1980s, and in 2000. I then discuss theoretical developments in the study of sentencing in the 1990s and 2000s. I then provide an overview of recent sentencing research focused on the following: (1) court organizational and social contexts, (2) individual courtroom workgroup members, (3) disparity conditional on intersecting defendant characteristics, (4) victim characteristics, and (5) earlier case processing events and decisions. I then outline several directions for moving sentencing research forward into the next decade.

Keywords:

• sentencing
• courts
• disparity

Notes

1. It should be noted that, especially in early years of guideline implementation, there were problems with non-uniform reporting of cases across county courts in some guideline states (such as Pennsylvania, see Kramer & Ulmer, 2009), and across the federal courts.

2. For example, many researchers have usefully relied on the SCPS data, which include pre-conviction information. However, the SCPS data also contain limited or relatively crude criminal history measures, and it is problematic to construct measures of offense severity that are applicable across state jurisdictions. As another example, I describe (Ulmer, 1997) how I attempted to include pre-conviction data from the docket transcript forms of the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts (AOPC). After a long delay, when I received the data-set from the AOPC, I found that key variables of interest, such as conviction outcomes and initial charges, were missing for over half the cases.

3. Spohn restricted her analysis to 40 sentencing outcome studies that had adequate offense and criminal history measures, and reported results from multivariate regression analyses.

4. It should be noted that the standard USSC files contain a variable for presentence detention, but not necessarily pretrial detention. One might be detained both pretrial and presentence, but this variable does not specify this, nor does it specify whether a defendant was released pretrial but detained presentence.

5. Though rare, substantial assistance departures following trial convictions are technically possible under the federal guidelines.

6. I thank an anonymous review for suggesting this point.