received his B. A. from the Coll~ge Fran.ais of Istanbul in 1958 and mnigrated to Canada the same year. He received a B. Sc. (Sociology) from the Universitd de Montreal in 19(A, and a M.A. (Criminology) from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966. He is now a Canadian Commonwealth Scholar studying at Oxford University towards the D. Phil. degree in the field of criminology. A. Normandeau received his B.A. from the Universit6 de Montral in 1962 and his B. Sc. (Sociology) from the same University in 1964. In 1966 he received his M.A. (Criminology) from the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1965 he has been enrolled in the Ph.D. (Sociology) program at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in criminology. A previous article of his appeared in the June, 1966 issue of this Journal.
A provisional but largely successful empirical model is presented which scales the relative seriousness of prior criminal records, reflecting the daily judgements of a large number of practising prosecutors on how they pragmatically rate the seriousness of criminal records. The amount and types of information available in the records kept are found to influence prosecutorial decisions with respect to how serious an offender an arrestee should be considered to be.
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