Law Commons^™

Examining Remorse In Attributions Of Focal Concerns During Sentencing: A Study Of Probation Officers, Colleen M. Berryessa

International Journal on Responsibility

This research, using interviews with probation officers in the United States (n = 151) and a constant comparative method for analysis, draws from the focal concerns framework to qualitatively model a process by which probation officers use a defendant’s remorse to attribute focal concerns in order to guide their sentencing recommendations in pre-sentencing reports. The model suggests that officers use expressions of remorse to make attributions about mitigated criminal intention (blameworthiness and notions of responsibility), reduced dangerousness and a high potential for reform (community protection), and organization-level effects for increasing caseload efficiency and using correctional resources (practical effects of …

A (Partial And Principled) Defense Of Sentences Of Life Imprisonment, Mirko Bagaric, Jennifer Svilar

Cleveland State Law Review

There has been more than a five-fold increase in the number of life sentences in the United States over the past four decades. One in seven prisoners in the United States is serving a life (or virtual) life sentence. This amounts to over 200,000 prisoners. The increase has occurred against the backdrop of near universal condemnation by scholars and public policy advocates – many of whom are now advocating for the abolition of life sentences. Arguments that life sentences are not an effective deterrent or means of protecting the community have some merit. Yet, we argue that in a limited …

Examining Legal Financial Obligations In Washington State, Bryan Lewis

PPPA Paper Prize

After criminal offenders are convicted of a crime, they must return to the court where a judge will determine their sentence. Sentencing often includes jail time, but it always includes monetary penalties, or Legal Financial Obligations (LFOs). There are many reasons these penalties are given, from restitution for the victims of criminal offenses, to providing government revenue and funding the court, to punishment for the offender. However, these fines, and the interest rates that come with them, often leave offenders with an enormous amount of debt. There are a lot of interests at stake when it comes to LFO sentencing …

Disparities In The Sentencing Of African American Men In Wayne County, Michigan, Brian Banks

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractThe ability of judges in the U.S. criminal justice system to administer penalties based on a defendant’s socioeconomic status has resulted in a disproportionate number of African Americans receiving harsher penalties than those of other racial groups and socioeconomic statuses. Currently, there is little evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of harsher sentencing of defendants with lower socioeconomic statuses in preventing crime or lowering recidivism, but more work is needed to clarify what sentencing factors judges use. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the factors that Wayne County, Michigan, judges used during the sentencing process of criminal defendants, along …

A Call To Dismantle Systemic Racism In Criminal Legal Systems, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Margaret C. Stevenson

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Objectives: In October 2021, APA passed a resolution addressing ways psychologists could work to dismantle systemic racism in criminal legal systems. The present report, developed to inform APA’s policy resolution, details the scope of the problem and offers recommendations for policy and psychologists to address the issue by advancing related science and practice. Specifically, it acknowledges the roots of modern-day racial and ethnic disparities in rates of criminalization and punishment for people of color as compared to White people. Next, the report reviews existing theory and research that helps explain the underlying psychological mechanisms driving racial and ethnic disparities …

After The Crime: Rewarding Offenders’ Positive Post-Offense Conduct, Paul H. Robinson, Muhammad Sarahne

All Faculty Scholarship

While an offender’s conduct before and during the crime is the traditional focus of criminal law and sentencing rules, an examination of post-offense conduct can also be important in promoting criminal justice goals. After the crime, different offenders make different choices and have different experiences, and those differences can suggest appropriately different treatment by judges, correctional officials, probation and parole supervisors, and other decision-makers in the criminal justice system.

Positive post-offense conduct ought to be acknowledged and rewarded, not only to encourage it but also as a matter of fair and just treatment. This essay describes four kinds of positive …

What's Wrong With Sentencing Equality?, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

Equality in criminal sentencing often translates into equalizing outcomes and stamping out variations, whether race-based, geographic, or random. This approach conflates the concept of equality with one contestable conception focused on outputs and numbers, not inputs and processes. Racial equality is crucial, but a concern with eliminating racism has hypertrophied well beyond race. Equalizing outcomes seems appealing as a neutral way to dodge contentious substantive policy debates about the purposes of punishment. But it actually privileges deterrence and incapacitation over rehabilitation, subjective elements of retribution, and procedural justice, and it provides little normative guidance for punishment. It also has unintended …

Justice: 1850s San Francisco And The California Gold Rush, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

Using stories from the 1848-1851 California gold miners, the 1851 San Francisco vigilante committees, Nazi concentration camps of the 1940s, and wagon trains of American westward migration in the 1840s, the chapter illustrates that it is part of human nature to see doing justice as a value in itself—in people’s minds it is not dependent for justification on the practical benefits it brings. Having justice done is sufficiently important to people that they willingly suffer enormous costs to obtain it, even when they were neither hurt by the wrong nor in a position to benefit from punishing the wrongdoer.

This …

Punishment: Drop City And The Utopian Communes, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

Using stories from the utopian non-punishment hippie communes of the late 1960's, the essay challenges today’s anti-punishment movement by demonstrating that the benefits of cooperative action are available only with the adoption of a system for punishing violations of core rules. Rather than being an evil system anathema to right-thinking people, punishment is the lynchpin of the cooperative action that has created human success.

This is Chapter 3 from the general audience book Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers: Lessons from Life Outside the Law. Chapter 4 of the book is also available on SSRN at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2416484).

Is Burglary A Violent Crime? An Empirical Investigation Of Classifying Burglary As A Violent Felony And Its Statutory Implications, Phillip Kopp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Under the common law, burglary is defined as a crime committed against the property of another, and is listed as a property offense for purposes of statistical description by the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). However, burglary is prosecuted and sentenced as a violent crime under habitual offender laws at the federal level, and can be regarded as violent in state law, depending on varied circumstances. Using a mixed methods approach, the current study compared state and federal burglary and habitual offender statutes to an empirical description of the offense. First, a comprehensive content …

Life Without Parole Under Modern Theories Of Punishment, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

Life without parole seems an attractive and logical punishment under the modern coercive crime-control principles of general deterrence and incapacitation, a point reinforced by its common use under habitual offender statutes like "three strikes." Yet, there is increasing evidence to doubt the efficacy of using such principles to distributive punishment. The prerequisite conditions for effective general deterrence are the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, effective and fair preventive detention is difficult when attempted through the criminal justice system. If we really are committed to preventive detention, it is better for both society and potential detainees that it be done …