Opening the Door for More: Assessing the Impact of Sentencing Reforms on Commitments to Prison Over Time
Tóm tắt
Since the early 1970s, U.S. states have adopted a series of sentencing reforms that have substantially altered sentencing and release policies by limiting discretion of judges, parole boards, and/or prison administrators. The current study assesses shifts in year-to-year changes in new commitments and parolees returned to prison within all 50 states from the years 1972 to 2008. The study tests the theory that sentencing reforms resulted in increased commitments to prison due to changes in the structures of sentencing and not due to increased crime. Data was analyzed using panel regression with robust standard errors, fixed effects, and conditional change scores. By treating six main sentencing reforms as dynamically interacting, the results suggest that certain combinations of sentencing reforms significantly increase new commitments while the number of parolees returned to prison was not meaningfully affected. The analysis further indicates that the combinations that the reforms appear in at the state-level influence the magnitude of the impacts of reforms.
Tài liệu tham khảo
Beckett, K. (1997). Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Blumstein, A. (1983). On the racial disproportionality of the United States prison population. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 73, 1259–1281.
Boerner, D., & Lieb, R. (2001). Sentencing reform in the other Washington. Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, 28, 71–136.
Bohm, R. M. (2006). “McJustice”: In the McDonaldization of criminal justice. Justice Quarterly, 23, 127–146.
Bureau of Justice Assistance. (1996). National Survey of Sate Sentencing Structures. Wahingtion, D.C.
Bureau of Justice Statistics. (1972). Prisoners in State and Federal Institutions on December 31, 1972 (through 1983). Washington DC.
Bureau of Justice Statistics. (1984). Correctional Populations in the United States, 1984 (throught 1998). Washington DC.
Bureau of Justice Statistics. (1999, 2008). Prisoners, 1999 (through 2008). Washington D.C.
Bureau of Labor Statistics. (1972). U.S. Department of Labor. Geographic Profile of Employment and Unemployment, 1972 (through 2008).
Bureau of the Census. (1970a). United States Census (Corresponding Year). Washington D.C.
Bureau of the Census. (1970b). U.S. Population Esitmates (On Line). Washington DC.
Bureau of the Census. (2008). Historical Poverty Tables (On Line). Washington DC.
Clear, T. R., & Frost, N. A. (2009). The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America. New York, NY: NYU Press.
D’Alessio, S. J., & Stolzenberg, L. (1995). The impact of sentencing guidelines on jail incarceration in Minnesota. Criminology, 33, 283–302.
DeFina, R. H., & Arvanites, T. M. (2002). The weak effect of imprisonment on crime: 1971–1998. Social Science Quarterly, 83, 635–653.
Dubin, M. J. (2007). Party Affiliations in the State Legislatures: A Year by Year Summary, 1796–2006. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland.
Engen, R. L., & Steen, S. (2000). The power to punish: Discretion and sentencing reform in the War on drugs. American Journal of Sociology, 105, 1357–1395.
Finkel, S. E. (1995). Causal Analysis with Panel Data. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0655/94023667-d.html http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0655/94023667-t.html.
Frase, R. S. (2005). State sentencing guidelines: Diversity, consensus, and unresolved policy issues. Columbia Law Review, 105, 1190–1232.
Garland, D. (2001). The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gottschalk, M. (2006). The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America. New York, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hagan, J. (2010). Who are the criminals? : The politics of crime policy from the age of Roosevelt to the age of Reagan. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Halaby, C. (2004). Panel models in sociological research: Theory into practice. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 507–544.
Harmon, M. G. (2011). The imprisonment race: Unintended consequences of “fixed” sentencing on people of color over time. Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, 9, 79–109.
Harmon, M. G. (2013). “Fixed” Sentencing: The Effect on Imprisonment Rates Over Time. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, (Forthcoming).
Helms, R., & Jacobs, D. (2002). The political context of sentencing: An analysis of community and individual determinates. Social Forces, 81, 577–604.
Hershey, M. R. (2007). Party Politics in America (12th ed.). New York: Pearson Longman. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip067/2006002846.html
Hsiao, C. (2003). Analysis of Panel Data (2nd ed.). Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Irwin, J., & Austin, J. (1997). America’s Imprisonment Binge. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub. Co.
Jaccard, J., & Turrisi, R. (2003). Interaction Effects in Multiple Regression (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications.
Jacobs, D., & Carmichael, J. T. (2001). The politics of punishment across time and space: A pooled time-series analysis of imprisonment rates. Social Forces, 80, 61–89.
Kruttschnitt, C. (2005). Imprisoning America: The social effects of mass incarceration. Contemporary Sociology-a Journal of Reviews, 34, 549–551.
LaFree, G. (1998). Losing Legitimacy: Street Crime and the Decline of Social Institutions in America. Boulder: Westview.
Marvell, T. B. (1995). Sentencing guidelines and prison population-growth. Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 85, 696–709.
McMahon, M. (1990). “Net-widening” vagaries in the use of a concept. The British Journal of Criminology, 30, 121–149.
Murtazashvili, I., & Wooldridge, J. M. (2008). Fixed effects instrumental variables estimation in correlated random coefficient panel data models. Journal of Econometrics, 142, 539–552. doi:10.1016/J.Jeconom.2007.09.001.
Nicholson-Crotty, S. (2004). The impact of sentencing guidelines on state-level sanctions: An analysis over time. Crime & Delinquency, 50, 395–411.
Savelsberg, J. (1992). Law that does Not Fit society: Sentencing guidelines as a neoclassical reaction to the dilemmas of substantivized law. American Journal of Sociology, 97, 1346–1381.
Scheingold, S. A. (1991). The Politics of Street Crime: Criminal Process and Cultural Obsession. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Schneider, A. (2006). Patterns of change in the use of imprisonment in the American states: An integration of path dependence, punctuated equilibrium and policy design approaches. Political Research Quarterly, 59, 457–470.
Schwartz, J., Steffensmeier, D. J., & Feldmeyer, B. (2009). Assessing trends in women’s violence via data triangulation: arrests, convictions, incarcerations, and victim reports. Social Problems, 56, 494–525.
Shane-DuBow, S. (1998). The development of structured sentencing: Long-term effects and outcomes. Law and Policy, 20, 383–531.
Simon, J. (2007). Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Sorensen, J., & Stemen, D. (2002). The effect of state sentencing policies on incarceration rates. Crime & Delinquency, 48(3), 456–475. doi:10.1177/001112870204800305.
Spelman, W. (2008). Specifying the relationship between crime and prisons. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 24, 149–178. doi:10.1007/s10940-008-9042-x.
Spelman, W. (2009). Crime, cash, and limited options: Explaining the prison boom. Criminology and Public Policy, 8, 29–77.
Steffensmeier, D., & Demuth, S. (2006). Does gender modify the effect of race-ethnicity on crime sanctioning? Sentencing for male and female white, black, and hispanic defendants. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 22, 241–261.
Stemen, D., & Rengifo, A. F. (2010). Policies and imprisonment: The impact of structured sentencing and determinate sentencing on state incarceration rates, 1978–2004. Justice Quarterly, 28(1), 174–201. doi:10.1080/07418821003694759.
Stemen, D., Rengifo, A., & Wilson, J. (2006). Of Fragmentation and Ferment: Impact of State Sentencing Policies on Incarceration Rates in the United States, 1975–2002. Washington DC: National Institute of Justice.
Tonry, M. (1995). Twenty years of sentencing reform: Steps forward, steps backward. Judicature, 78, 169–172.
Tonry, M. (2009). Explanations of American punishment policies a national history. Punishment & Society-International Journal of Penology, 11, 377–394.
Warr, M. (1995). Public opinion on crime and punishment. Public Opinion Quarterly, 59, 296–310.
Wooldridge, J. M. (1997). Multiplicative panel data models without the strict exogeneity assumption. Econometric Theory, 13, 667–678.
Zhang, Y., Maxwell, C. D., & Vaughn, M. S. (2009). The impact of state sentencing policies on the US prison population. Journal of Criminal Justice, 37, 190–199.