Race/ethnicity, sex, age and fines: a focal concerns approach

ABSTRACT

The focal concerns approach has been applied broadly in the sentencing literature. Research that has relied on this perspective generally finds that young, non-white men tend to receive the most punitive criminal sanctions. This perspective has less often been applied to non-custodial types of punishments, such as fines. Using data from the State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS) database from 2009, we examine the effects of defendant characteristics on fine imposition and amounts. In contrast to other sentencing research, we find that Black men under 50 and Black women over 50 are least likely to receive fines. Additionally, Hispanic men 31–49 receive fines of the greatest amounts. The current study contributes to sentencing research by focusing on fines as the sentencing outcome instead of the commonly used sentencing severity and our findings are unique to this area of research.

KEYWORDS:

• Fines
• legal financial obligations
• race/ethnicity
• focal concerns

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In this study, our analyses focus specifically on fines.

2. The counties included in the SCPS dataset are Arizona (Maricopa, Pima); California (Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Ventura); Connecticut (Hartford); Florida (Broward, Miami-Dade, Hillsborough; Orange); Hawaii (Honolulu); Illinois (Cook); Indiana (Marion); Maryland (Baltimore, Montgomery, Prince George); Michigan (Oakland, Wayne); Missouri (Saint Louis); New Jersey (Essex, Middlesex); New York (Bronx, Kings, Nassau, New York, Suffolk); North Carolina (Wake); Ohio (Cuyahoga, Franklin, Hamilton); Tennessee (Shelby); Texas (Dallas, El Paso, Harris, Tarrant); Utah (Salt Lake City);Washington (King); and Wisconsin (Milwaukee).

3. Following a reviewer suggestion, we used multiple imputation techniques using chained equations. We imputed the following variables: whether a fine was imposed (556 missing values), criminal history (222 missing values), active status in the criminal justice system (102 missing values), and pretrial detention (108 missing values), performing ten imputations. Though the results using the imputed data were largely similar to analyses using list-wise deletion, we present the imputed models.

4. Convicted offenders in these data may have been incarcerated to prison or jail with or without probation, sentenced to probation only, sentenced to probation alongside other sanctions, or given a fine. This variable reflects any individual who received a fine regardless of other sanctions. Only 173 of the convicted offenders received only a fine, representing less than 2% of the data. Fines were received by 13% of offenders who were sentenced to prison plus probation, 14% of offenders who were sentenced to prison without probation, 21% of offenders who were sentenced to jail plus probation, 14% of offenders who were sentenced to jail without probation, and 40% of offenders sentenced to probation plus other conditions.

5. Our criminal history factor produced an Eigenvalue of 2.75 with each component loading at 44 or greater.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Megan T. Parks

Megan Parks is a Doctoral student in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Washington State University. Her research interests include police-community interactions, rural criminal justice, and courts and sentencing outcomes. Her research has appeared in the British Journal of Criminology.

Jeffrey S. Nowacki

Jeffrey Nowacki is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Colorado State University. His research interests include federal and state sentencing outcomes, police organizations, and gender and crime. His recent research has appeared in the British Journal of Criminology, Justice Evaluation Journal, and Criminal Justice Policy Review.