Community Context and Sentencing Decisions in 39 Counties in the United States, 1998
Description
This study aimed to understand the extent to which
punishment is influenced by the larger social context in which it
occurs by examining both the main and conditioning influence of
community context on individual sentences. The primary research
questions for this study were (1) Does community context affect
sentencing outcomes for criminal defendants net of the influence of
defendant and case characteristics? and (2) Does community context
condition the influences of defendant age, race, and sex on sentencing
outcomes? Data from the 1998 State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS)
were merged with a unique county-level dataset that provided
information on the characteristics of the counties in which defendants
were adjudicated. County-level data included unemployment, crime
rates, sex ratio, age structure, religious group affiliation, and
political orientation.
Resources
| Name |
Format |
Description |
Link |
|
0 |
ICPSR03923.v1 |
https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR03923.v1 |
Tags
- counties
- defendants
- state-courts
- court-cases
- sentencing
- case-processing
- felons
- communities