Gauging the totality of criminal legal sanctions and punishment
Implications for research and policy on retribution and deterrence
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12664037 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daniel P Mears (0000-0001-8594-5350, Florida State University, corresponding author), Mark C Stafford (Texas State University) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 984-1008 |
| Publication date | 2025-06-10 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Punishment & Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1462-4745 • E-ISSN: 1741-3095 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/14624745251344576 |
| OpenAlex | W4411162647 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 59 |
Punishment—the pain and suffering associated with particular criminal legal sanctions-is central to criminal justice policy. Yet, there is a paucity of studies on the totality of legal sanctions, including the sum of all court-issued sentences, and the punishment that they produce. The gap is striking given that the totality of sanction-related punishment is central to crime and justice policy goals. These center around how society should respond to crime and include retributive and utilitarian goals, including deterrence. Despite advances in scholarship on sentencing, conceptual confusion remains about the relative punishment produced by criminal legal sanctions and, by extension, the totality of related punishment. We present a conceptual framework for estimating the totality of legal sanctions and the punishment associated with them, and then discuss implications of this framework for estimating the punishment associated with all legal sanctions. Then we elaborate on the implications of the framework both for evaluating the extent to which legal sanctions achieve retributive or crime-deterrent goals and for efforts to place criminal justice policy on an evidence-based foundation
Criminal justice · Criminal law · Criminology · Deterrence (psychology · Economic Justice · Law and economics · Political science · Punishment (psychology · Retributive justice · Sanctions · Sociology · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology
Crime, punishment, and deterrence
Confronting Penal Excess
Criminal Deterrence
The Oxford Handbook of Evidence-Based Crime and Justice Policy
Stigma
Moving the National Institute of Justice Forward
Retributivism and Over-Punishment
Assessing Motivations for Punishment
When Pre-Release Optimism Meets Post-Release Reality
How Much Do We Really Know about Criminal Deterrence
Doing Justice, Preventing Crime
Prisoner Reentry in the Era of Mass Incarceration
The Hidden Measurement Crisis in Criminology
A Reconceptualization of General and Specific Deterrence
The Effectiveness of Correctional Rehabilitation
Perceptual Research on General Deterrence
Restricting the Use of Solitary Confinement
Sanctions, Perceptions, and Crime
How punitive is pretrial? Measuring the relative pains of pretrial detention
Benefit-Cost Analysis of Crime Prevention Programs
Deinstitutionalization and Diversion of Juvenile Offenders
Adjusting to Prison Life
Proportionality in the Philosophy of Punishment
Toward a systematic foundation for identifying evidence-based criminal justice sanctions and their relative effectiveness
Evaluating performance of criminal justice agencies
The relationship between crime and “objective” versus “subjective” strains
Penality and the Penal State
The Meaning of Arrest for Wife Assault
Protestant Fundamentalism and the Retributive Doctrine of Punishment
The Society of Captives
The Deterrent Effect of Perceived Severity of Punishment
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |