Empirical investigations of criminal sentencing represent a vast research enterprise in criminology. However, this research has been restricted almost exclusively to U.S. contexts, and often it suffers from key data limitations. As such, an examination of more detailed international sentencing data provides an important opportunity to assess the generalizability of contemporary research and theorizing on criminal punishment in the United States. The current study investigates little‐researched questions about the influence of prosecutorial sentencing recommendations, victim/offender relationships, and extralegal disparities in sentencing by analyzing unique data on the punishment of homicide offenders in the Netherlands. The results indicate that offender, victim, and situational offense characteristics all exert important independent effects at sentencing and that prosecutorial recommendations exert powerful influences over judicial sentences. The article concludes with a discussion of future directions for comparative sentencing research across international contexts.
The current study investigates the effects of structured risk-based pre-sentence reports on sentencing outcomes in the Netherlands by means of a quasi-natural experiment. Defendants with such a report are compared with similar defendants without such a report, based on propensity score matching and synchronization on nine additional criteria relevant to penal decision-making (N = 6118). Although structured risk-based pre-sentence reports are a textbook example of 'new penological' accounts, high-risk defendants with such a report are not sentenced to more 'controlling' and less 'diverting' sentencing outcomes than are high-risk defendants without such a report. Instead, these reports overall relate to less 'controlling' and more 'diverting' sentencing outcomes, indicating that the penal welfarism account is still prevalent in penal decision-making in the Netherlands.
Between 2005 and 2015 the Dutch prison population decreased by 44 percent. Such a rapid yet sustained reduction in the number of prisoners has no parallel in the Western world in this period. What are the factors that underlie this unique development? This article charts the decline of prisoner numbers in the Netherlands and considers areas that may account for it. It takes a systemic approach which considers publicly available data that has involved the whole of the criminal justice system. It finds that a serious decline in crimes reported to the police is part of the explanation. Although the overall percentage of cases solved by the police has not changed and the prosecution office has not become more reluctant to forward cases to court, fewer cases that warrant imprisonment have come before the court over this period. In addition, the average sentence length imposed by judges has gone down. The proportion of acquittals has gone up. This shows that any explanation should involve developments in policing as well as in the courtroom. However, questions regarding police capacity to deal with serious and organized crime call into question any conclusion that the Dutch carceral collapse is simply due to a decrease in crime. The reality underlying this remarkable reduction in the number of people in prison at any one time in the Netherlands requires a more multifaceted answer than this.
Een en ander is geregeld in art. 3 en 6 van de Wet Schadefonds Geweldsmisdrijven. 2 Dit blijkt uit de jaarverslagen. Deze kunnen worden geraadpleegd via www. schadefonds. nl/ jaarverslagen. 3 Dit is bepaald in art. 8 van de Wet Schadefonds Geweldsmisdrijven. 4 Zie www. schadefonds. nl/ veelgestelde-vragen/ commissieleden-van-het-schadefonds.
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