Research on when alternatives to incarceration are availableand for whomis underdeveloped. In this study we introduce the concept of "salvageability" as a fourth focal concern guiding the decisions of court actors. In assessing salvageability, actors must consider the casual reasons behind offenders' criminal involvement and the extent to which those causes can be ameliorated through rehabilitative programming. This process of causal attribution likely exacerbates racial disparity in sentences. We test whether offender race, gender, and prior histories of substance use affect assessments of salvageability as indicated by prosecutor decisions to pre-screen offenders for admittance into an intensive rehabilitation alternative sentence in Pennsylvania using linked data from the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing and the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. Results suggest that black offenders are substantially less likely to be referred for the rehabilitative program even if that referral would be an upward departure from a guidelines-conforming sentence.
Objectives: To determine whether different conceptions (Populist, Patrician) and operationalizations of “white-collar crime” produce different substantive conclusions, using the applied case of sentencing in federal criminal court. Method: Federal Justice Statistics Program data are used to identify white-collar and comparable crimes referred for prosecution in 2009 to 2011 that were also sentenced through 2013. Five different operational strategies are used to identify “white-collar crime” and are employed in separate hurdle regressions jointly capturing incarceration and sentence length. Differences in model coefficients and case composition are discussed across definitions. Results: There are differences in the relationship between “white-collar crime” and incarceration both between and within Populist and Patrician conceptions. These differences are most pronounced at the in/out decision but are also present for sentence length. Conclusions: Contradictory findings from past research are largely able to be replicated within a single sample simply by changing the conception and operationalization of white-collar crime used. This demonstrates that debating what is “truly” white-collar crime is not just an exercise in semantics—it is a conceptual and methodological choice that can have dramatic consequences on what (we think) we know about the treatment of white-collar crime in the criminal justice system.
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