Download or read book Community Context and Sentencing Decisions written by Noelle Fearn and published by LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. This book was released on 2010-06 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Criminal sentencing is a quite visible and very important stage of the criminal justice process. Due partly to its visibility and to its potentially devastating impact on individuals and communities, there is more interest now than ever before in how we sentence and punish criminal offenders. The development and implementation of various legislative initiatives (e.g., sentencing guidelines/grids and mandatory minimums) are evidence of the public's and policymaker's distrust of criminal justice authorities' ability to appropriately and fairly sentence criminal offenders. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the sentencing of convicted felony defendants across large, urban counties in the United States. Three different sentencing outcomes are examined and particular focus is placed on the importance of contextual influences on sentencing outcomes for individual offenders--along with defendant and case/legal characteristics. This analysis helps shed light on the factors that influence sentencing decisions and broadens our understanding of sentencing to include defendant, case/offense, and community characteristics.
Download or read book Social Worlds of Sentencing written by Jeffery T. Ulmer and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1997-07-31 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combines quantitative and qualitative data in a careful investigation of sentencing processes and context under Pennsylvania's sentencing guidelines.
Download or read book The Social Contexts of Criminal Sentencing written by Martha A. Myers and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historically, the announcement and invocation of criminal penalties were public spectacles. Today, fear of crime and disaffection with the criminal justice system guarantee that this public fascination with punishment continues. In the past decade, virtually every legislature in the country has undertaken sentencing reform, in the hope that public concern with crime would be allayed and dispari ties in criminal sentences would be reduced if not eliminated. Scholars have intensified their longstanding preoccupation with discrimination and the sources of disparate treatment during sentencing - issues that continue to fuel contem porary reform efforts. As documented in Chapter 1, empirical research on sen tencing has concentrated much of its attention on the offender. Only recently have attempts been made to imbed sentencing in its broader organizational and social contexts. Our study extends these attempts by quantitatively analyzing the relationship between the offender and the social contexts in which he or she is sentenced. We use data on felony sentencing in Georgia between 1976 and 1985 to ask three questions. The first addresses an issue of perennial concern: during sentencing, how important are offender attributes, both those of explicit legal relevance and traits whose legal relevance is questionable or nonexistent? The second question directs attention to the social contexts of sentencing and asks whether they directly affect sentencing outcomes.
Download or read book Sentencing Policy and Social Justice written by Ralph Henham and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sentencing Policy and Social Justice argues that the promotion of social justice should become a key objective of sentencing policy, advancing the argument that the legitimacy of sentencing ultimately depends upon the strength of the relationship between social morality and penal ideology. It sheds light on how shared moral values can influence sentencing policy at a time when relationships of community appear increasingly fragmented, arguing that sentencing will be better placed to make a positive contribution to social justice if it becomes more sensitive to the commonly-accepted moral boundaries that underpin adherence to the 'rule of law'. The need to reflect public opinion in sentencing has received significant attention more recently, with renewed interest in jury sentencing, 'stakeholder sentencing', and the involvement of community views when regulating policy. The author, however, advocates a different approach, combining a new theoretical focus with practical suggestions for reform, and arguing that the contribution sentencing can make to social justice necessitates a fundamental change in the way shared values about the advantages of punishment are reflected in penal ideology and sentencing policy. Using examples from international, comparative and domestic contexts to advance the moral and ethical case for challenging the existing theories of sentencing, the book develops the author's previous theoretical ideas and outlines how these changes could be given practical shape within the context of sentencing in England and Wales. It assesses the consequences for penal governance due to increased state regulation of discretionary sentencing power and examines the prospects for achieving the kind of moral transformation regarded as necessary to reverse such a move. To illustrate these issues each chapter focuses on a particularly problematic area for contemporary sentencing policy; namely, the sentencing of women; the sentencing of irregular migrants; sentencing for offences of serious public disorder; and sentencing for financial crime.
Download or read book Guidelines Manual written by United States Sentencing Commission and published by . This book was released on 1988-10 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Handbook on Punishment Decisions written by Jeffery T. Ulmer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-16 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Handbook on Punishment Decisions: Locations of Disparity provides a comprehensive assessment of the current knowledge on sites of disparity in punishment decision-making. This collection of essays and reports of original research defines disparity broadly to include the intersection of race/ethnicity, gender, age, citizenship/immigration status, and socioeconomic status, and it examines dimensions such as how pretrial or guilty plea processes shape exposure to punishment, how different types of sentencing decisions and/or policy structures (sentencing guidelines, mandatory minimums, risk assessment tools) might shape and condition disparity, and how post-sentencing decisions involving probation and parole contribute to inequalities. The sixteen contributions pull together what we know and what we don’t about punishment decision-making and plow new ground for further advances in the field. The ASC Division on Corrections & Sentencing Handbook Series publishes volumes on topics ranging from violence risk assessment to specialty courts for drug users, veterans, or people with mental illness. Each thematic volume focuses on a single topical issue that intersects with corrections and sentencing research.
Download or read book Sentencing Guidelines written by John H. Kramer and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sentencing guidelines, adopted by many states in recent decades, are intended to eliminate the impact of bias based on factors ranging from a criminal?s ethnicity or gender to the county in which he or she was convicted. But have these guidelines achieved their goal of ?fair punishment?? And how do the concerns of local courts shape sentencing under guidelines? In this comprehensive examination of the development, reform, and application of sentencing guidelines in one of the first states to employ them, John Kramer and Jeffery Ulmer offer a nuanced analysis of the complexities involved in administering justice.
Download or read book Punishing Criminals written by Malcolm Davies and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1993-07-28 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Punishing Criminals is about sentencing theory and policy and the attempt to identify punishments other than imprisonment. Davies argues for the need to develop more credible and effective community-based intermediate sanctions that have the confidence of the public and the officials in the criminal system. He shows how focus groups can be used to improve the process of consultation. He sees the need to locate sentencing policy decisions within the wider context of the criminal justice process and presents empirical evidence from ten years study of the California criminal justice system. He sets out a denunciatory-retributive rationale for punishment which links sentencing aims with a community's confidence in different forms of punishment.
Download or read book Handbook on the Consequences of Sentencing and Punishment Decisions written by Beth M. Huebner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Handbook on the Consequences of Sentencing and Punishment Decisions, the third volume in the Routledge ASC Division on Corrections & Sentencing Series, includes contemporary essays on the consequences of punishment during an era of mass incarceration. The Handbook Series offers state-of-the-art volumes on seminal and topical issues that span the fields of sentencing and corrections. In that spirit, the editors gathered contributions that summarize what is known in each topical area and also identify emerging theoretical, empirical, and policy work. The book is grounded in the current knowledge about the specific topics, but also includes new, synthesizing material that reflects the knowledge of the leading minds in the field. Following an editors’ introduction, the volume is divided into four sections. First, two contributions situate and contextualize the volume by providing insight into the growth of mass punishment over the past three decades and an overview of the broad consequences of punishment decisions. The overviews are then followed by a section exploring the broader societal impacts of punishment on housing, employment, family relationships, and health and well-being. The third section centers on special populations and examines the unique effects of punishment for juveniles, immigrants, and individuals convicted of sexual or drug-related offenses. The fourth section focuses on institutional implications with contributions on jails, community corrections, and institutional corrections.
Download or read book Decisions to Imprison written by Rasmus H. Wandall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rasmus Wandall uses quantitative and qualitative methods from studies carried out in Denmark, to address the formal and informal norms and ideologies that are used to generate decisions to imprison. Focusing on the operations of the courtroom participants, his work investigates how court decision-making is organized to allow the sentencing procedure to be open to more than its formal legal framework, while at the same time keeping the sentencing within the boundaries of law and legal validity. The author uses the theory of law's operational closure, developed by Niklas Luhmann. The theory provides an advantageous point of departure to capture the close and subtle interactions between law's need for validity and for contextual openness in every legal operation - including court decision-making.
Download or read book Contextual Characteristics in Juvenile Sentencing written by Rimonda Maroun and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-25 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While there is extensive research published concerning juvenile justice and sentencing, most of the research focuses on individual and extra-legal factors, such as age, race, and gender, with scant attention paid to the impact of macro-level factors. This book assesses how a specific contextual factor—concentrated disadvantage—impacts juvenile court outcomes and considers the relevant implications for the current state of juvenile justice processing. Using case-level data from a Southern state with a large, diverse population and contextual-level data from the 2010 US Census and American Community Survey, Maroun assesses whether youth living in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage experience harsher outcomes than their counterparts from other types of neighborhoods. Additionally, she examines whether concentrated disadvantage interacts with individual race/ethnicity to influence juvenile court outcomes. Results suggested a direct impact of concentrated disadvantage on diversion, adjudication, and probation type. Further, race significantly interacted with concentrated disadvantage in impacting adjudication and probation outcomes, while ethnicity significantly interacted with concentrated disadvantage in impacting disposition and commitment type. This research expands the knowledge of macrolevel influences on juvenile court outcomes, providing support for the notion that community context impacts juvenile justice processing. Results also highlight the fact that judges use discretion as well as other legal and extralegal factors in exerting social control, and do so differently at each stage of processing. This monograph is essential reading for those engaged in youth and juvenile justice efforts and scholars interested in issues surrounding race, class, social policy, and justice.
Download or read book Sentencing and Criminal Justice written by Andrew Ashworth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-03 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing unrivalled coverage of one of the most high-profile stages in the criminal justice process, this book examines the key issues in sentencing policy and practice. It provides an up-to-date account of the legislation on sentencing together with the ever-increasing amount of Court of Appeal case law. The law in relation to elements of the wider criminal justice system is examined, including the prison and probation services. The aim of the book is to examine English sentencing law in its context, drawing not only upon legislation and the decisions of the courts but also upon the findings of research and on theoretical justifications for punishment. This new edition has been extensively revised to integrate the new laws introduced by the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which has brought sweeping reforms into English sentencing.
Download or read book Criminal Sentences written by Marvin E. Frankel and published by . This book was released on 1973-01 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sentencing and the Legitimacy of Trial Justice written by Ralph Henham and published by . This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the under-researched relationship between sentencing and the legitimacy of punishment. It argues that there is an increasing gap between what is perceived as legitimate punishment and the sentencing decisions of the criminal courts. Drawing on a wide variety of empirical research evidence, the book explores how sentencing could be developed within a more socially-inclusive framework for the delivery of trial justice. In the international context, such developments are directly relevant to the future role of the International Criminal Court, especially its ability to deliver more coherent and inclusive trial outcomes that contribute to social reconstruction. Similarly, in the national context, these issues have a vital role to play in helping to re-position trial justice as a credible cornerstone of criminal justice governance where social diversity persists. In so doing the book should help policy-makers in appreciating the likely implications for criminal trials of 'mainstreaming' restorative forms of justice. Sentencing and the Legitimacy of Trial Justice firmly ties the issue of legitimacy to the relevant context for delivering 'justice'. It suggests a need to develop the tools and methods for achieving this and offers some novel solutions to this complex problem. This book will be a valuable resource for graduate students, academics, practitioners and policy makers in the field of criminal justice as well as scholars interested in socio-legal and cross-disciplinary approaches to the analysis of criminal process and sentencing and the development of theory and comparative methodology in this area.
Download or read book Sentencing as a Human Process written by John Hogarth and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1971-12-15 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sentencing is not a neutral or mechanical act; it is a human process, highly charged affectively and motivationally. Sentencing decisions take place in a social environment of laws, facts, ideas, and people. This study of sentencing behaviour is primarily concerned with the mental processes involved in decision-making. It is based on intensive interviews and on measures of the information-processing ability of seventy-one full-time judges in Ontario. The work covers such topics as: problems of sentencing (particularly existing disparities); social and economic background of judges and their varying penal philosophies; the nature and measurement of judicial attitudes toward crime; punishment and related issues; prediction of sentencing behaviour based on attitude scales (which the author has constructed) and also on 'fact patterns perceived by judges'; and the impact of social and legal constraints on the sentencing process. The study concludes that there exists a very high correlation between a judges definition of situation and the sentence which he imposes and that while sentences meted out for a particular law violation under similar circumstances may differ among judges, judges are 'highly consistent within themselves.' Using these conclusions the author constructs a model of judicial behaviour and shows how this model can be used to predict and to explain sentencing and breaks new ground in the use of the social and behavioural sciences as sources of data to explain the sentencing process.
Download or read book Applications of Heuristics and Biases to Social Issues written by Linda Heath and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-29 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the latest research on applying heuristics and biases to the areas of health, law, education, and organizations. Authors adopt a cross-disciplinary approach to study various theories.
Download or read book Crime and Disorder in Community Context written by Rebecca Wickes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on unique longitudinal community-level data in Brisbane, this book entwines current ecological theories of crime with key debates on the relevance of ‘community’ in contemporary urban life to examine the spatial and temporal relationships between community structure, community social capital, informal social control and the occurrence of crime and disorder. Crime and Disorder in Community Context extends what is known about the concentration of crime in particular types of places, presenting a broad reaching explication of how community structural characteristics, community regulatory processes and crime influence each other over time. It looks at how growing levels of ethnic diversity, income inequality and increasing immigrant concentrations at the community level influence processes necessary for the regulation of crime; the crime control processes for various crime problems in different types of communities; the extent that exogenous shocks, like the 2011 Brisbane flood disaster and the global financial crisis impact on crime, crime prevention and crime control; and engages readers with the methodological complexities associated with the longitudinal study of crime and disorder in contemporary urban communities. An accessible and compelling read, this will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, geography, cultural studies and all those interested in the relationship between crime and community.
