Back to Basics: A Critical Examination of the Focal Concerns Framework from the Perspective of Judges

Abstract

The focal concerns framework is widely used in research on sentencing, although the empirical validity of the framework itself is seldom directly evaluated. To fill this gap, we use survey data from 134 trial court judges to examine two basic questions about the focal concerns framework: (1) How and to what extent do judges consider the original focal concerns of blameworthiness, community protection, and practical constraints in their sentencing decisions? (2) To what extent is perceived rehabilitation potential, or “redeemability,” considered by judges and should it become a fourth focal concern? Results based on open-ended survey questions reveal that judges continue to rely on the original focal concerns, but they operationalize these concerns in a variety of ways. Results further show that most judges are concerned about the rehabilitation potential, or “redeemability,” of defendants. Based on these results, we conclude that the focal concerns framework continues to be of value but that future research using the framework should consider adding redeemability/rehabilitation potential as a fourth focal concern. We caution, however, that some of the factors judges consider in connection with rehabilitation potential/redeemability could increase sentencing disparities.

Keywords:

• sentencing
• judges
• focal concerns

Acknowledgement

This research was funded by the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing and the Penn State Criminal Justice Research Center.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We were under considerable pressure to keep the survey instrument short to maximize the response rate among judges. Therefore, given recent literature suggesting its importance, rehabilitation potential/redeemability was the only potentially new focal concern we explored. We did, however, give judges an opportunity to mention other concerns not captured in our brief survey instrument.

2 One might suspect that judges agreed with these considerations, specifically “rehabilitation potential,” simply because we prompted them to think about them. However, we find it unlikely that judges would have offered such a strong degree of endorsement if rehabilitation potential were not of genuine concern to them. Furthermore, many judges did not strongly endorse blameworthiness, or especially court-related practical constraints, even though we prompted them to think about these. This suggests to us that mere prompting is not likely to explain our findings.

3 We treat these models as exploratory because calculations of statistical power with our judge sample showed that our models only exhibited moderate power to detect small- to medium effects (1 - β = .40).