The Political Context of Sentencing
An Analysis of Community and Individual Determinants
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2985736 |
|---|---|
| Authors | R Helms, Ronald G Helms (Western Washington University), D Jacobs (0000-0002-6079-8427), David R Jacobs (0000-0002-7232-0543, The Ohio State University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2002 |
| Volume | 81 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 577-604 |
| Publication date | 2002-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Forces (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0037-7732 • E-ISSN: 1534-7605 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1353/sof.2003.0012 |
| OpenAlex | W2157200108 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 72 |
| References cited | 49 |
Most studies of jail or prison sentence length focus on whether offender characteristics produce sentencing differentials after legal effects have been controlled, but the findings in the literature have not been consistent, probably because most studies have been based on a few jurisdictions. To see if political effects explain these discrepancies, this study of 337 jurisdictions in seven states analyzes interaction effects between external political influences and offender attributes after holding constant multiple individual and environmental factors. To adjust for censoring, Tobit is used to analyze the length of sentences, while state differences are held constant with state-specific dummy variables. When interaction terms are not included, the results are consistent with prior research. But the inclusion of political interactions produces findings suggesting that African Americans and males receive longer sentences when local courts are embedded in conservative political environments where a law-and-order presidential candidate received more votes. These results support theoretical claims that punishment is an intensely political process
Censoring (clinical trials) · Context (archaeology) · Econometrics · Economics · Geography · Political science · Politics · Presidential system · Punishment (psychology) · Sentence · Tobit model · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Law · Psychology · Psychopathy, Forensic Psychiatry, Sexual Offending · Social Psychology
Bail and Pretrial Detention
Evaluating public perceptions of the risk presented by registered sex offenders
Ideology, Social Threat, and the Death Sentence
Multilevel Models
The Political Sociology of Criminal Justice
Criminal Prosecutions
Opening Pandora’s Box
A Multilevel Test of Minority Threat Effects on Sentencing
A Multilevel Analysis of Community Effects on Criminal Sentencing
Racial/Ethnic Threat and Federal Sentencing
Managing the Boundaries of Taste
Testing the interrelationship between area deprivation and ethnic disparities in sentencing
Developing a Complete Sentence Severity Scale using Extended Goodman RC models
Revisiting the Minority Threat Perspective
Parole, Neighborhood and Reentry Outcomes
Tackling selection bias in sentencing data analysis
Determinants of case outcomes in Rwanda's postgenocide gacaca courts
The Black Effect
Examining American Indian Disadvantage
Political pressure and information bias in arrests hearings in Mexico city
The Origins of Mass Incarceration
How do county-level ethno-racial composition and residential segregation influence pretrial decisions? Results from a multi-level, multi-decade study
Social control and neglect at a crossroads
The Impact of Political Context on Local Law Enforcement Resourcing
Development of Groundwater Markets in China
Gender and “Other People's Money”
Ending Mass Incarceration
Censored Regression in Response to the Distributional Realities of Crime and Justice Measures
Temporal analyses of American Indian disadvantage
What is theoretical support? Explanation as a central barometer in sentencing research
Race and Revocation
Inequality on probation
Decomposition of Racial Differences in Sentencing
Predicting Preadjudication Detention Decisions
Clouding climate science
Punishing the Wrongdoers
The Legacy of Slavery and Mass Incarceration
On the Politics of Imprisonments
Sentencing in light of collateral consequences
Community influence on prosecutorial dismissals
Modeling the politics of punishment
Gender, race/ethnicity and prediction
Sentencing policy and disparity
Sentencing disparities for juvenile offenders sentenced to adult prisons
Is All Punishment Local? The Effects of Jurisdictional Context on Sentence Length
Criminal Threat, Immigrant/Minority Threat, and Political Ideology
Sentencing Rationales and Judicial Decision Making at the International Criminal Tribunals
The Power of Diversion
Back‐end Sentencing” and Reimprisonment
The Multilevel Context of Criminal Sentencing
Contextual Disparities in Guidelines Departures
The Juvenile Penalty
Punishing the “Model Minority”
The Social Context of Guidelines Circumvention
Political Climate, Voter Suppression Policies and Federal Sentencing Outcomes
Politics and State Punitiveness in Black and White
Understanding the place of punishment
Justice by Other Means
Does Racial Balance in Workforce Representation Yield Equal Justice? Race Relations of Sentencing in Federal Court Organizations
Sentencing and State-Level Racial and Ethnic Contexts
Race, gender, and place
Who Survives on Death Row? An Individual and Contextual Analysis
Status Disparities in the Capital of Capital Punishment
The Penology of Racial Innocence
The Model Minority Myth for Noncitizen Immigration Offenses and Sentencing Outcomes
Racial Disparities in Pretrial Diversion
Expanding the Castle
Proliferation of Punishment
Social Organization, Collective Sentiment, and Legal Sanctions in Murder Cases
Less Crime, More Punishment
Single Mother Families and Industrial Pollution in Metropolitan America
A Long Road to Freedom
Chain Reaction
Ethnicity, race, and crime
Taming the System
Punishment and Social Structure
The Culture of Control
The Changing Forms of Racial/Ethnic Biases in Sentencing
Sex effects and sentencing
A Heteroskedasticity-Consistent Covariance Matrix Estimator and a Direct Test for Heteroskedasticity
Discipline and Punish
Toward a Theory of Minority Group Relations
The Social Contexts of Criminal Sentencing
Social Threat and Social Control
Punishment and Modern Society
Policing the Ghetto Underclass
Labor Surplus and Punishment
The Rules Have Changed‐so Proceed With Caution
The Dialectics of Legal Repression
The Interaction of Race, Gender, and Age in Criminal Sentencing
Race, Racial Threat, and Sentencing of Habitual Offenders
Gender and Imprisonment Decisions
Determinate Sentencing and Abolishing Parole
State Revenue Extraction from Different Income Groups
Race and the War on Crime
Global and National Sources of Political Protest
Budgets, Institutions, and Change
Changing Conceptions of Race
Racial Discrimination in Criminal Sentencing
Perceptions of Racial Group Competition
Inequality and Police Strength
Socioeconomic Status and Criminal Sentences
On Methodology, Theory and Ideology
The Sex-Sanctioning Issue
Immigrants, Urban Politics, and Policing in 1900
A Longitudinal Study of the Effect of Race on Sentencing
Political Participation and Government Responsiveness
The Supreme Court as a Countermajoritarian Institution? The Impact of Public Opinion on Supreme Court Decisions
Attitudes toward Cohabitation, Family, and Gender Roles
The Impact of Gender-Based Family Roles on Criminal Sentencing
Modeling the Relationships Between Macro Forms of Social Control
Race and Imprisonment Decisions
Imprisonment and Social Classification in Five Common-Law Democracies, 1955-1985
The Determinants of Deadly Force
Toward a Political Model of Incarceration
Macroeconomics, Economic Stratification, and Partisanship
Knowledge, Domination, and Criminal Punishment
Perspectives on the Legal Order
| Unique citing works | 72 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3,27 |
| Citation span | 2004 - 2026 (23) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 69 |