Modeling the Effects of Legally Relevant and Extralegal Factors Under Sentencing Guidelines: The Rules Have Changed*

Abstract

Studies of sentencing in jurisdictions with sentencing guidelines have generally failed to specify adequately the effects of offense seriousness and criminal history—the principal factors that, by law, should determine sentencing decisions. As a result, the explanatory power of those models is seriously limited, and regression coefficients representing both legal and extralegal factors may be biased. We present an alternative approach to specify more precisely the effects of legally relevant factors on sentencing outcomes and test the approach using felony sentencing data from Washington State. We find that controlling for the presumptive sentence substantially improves the fit and explanatory power of models predicting sentencing decisions, and that the estimated effects of extralegal factors, specifically sex and race, reduce considerably. The findings have both substantive and methodological implications.

Sentencing Outcomes Under Competing But Coexisting Sentencing Interventions: Untying The Gordian Knot

“…It would simply be an unintelligible jumble of attribute information that masks any one factor's independent effects. The same is true of the offense seriousness score and, in the case of federal sentencing outcomes, the presumptive sentence or sentencing midpoint (Engen & Gainey, 2000). In fact, several factors composing the offense seriousness score (offense type, amount and type of drugs involved, number of conviction counts, and presence of career criminal status) are theoretically important enough to individually control their potential direct effects.…”

Conditional Race Disparities in Criminal Sentencing: A Test of the Liberation Hypothesis From a Non-Guidelines State

“…Several scholars have reported that this alternative specification has increased the explained variance of their sentencing models in guidelines jurisdictions (e.g., Bushway and Piehl, 2001;Engen and Gainey, 2000;Mustard, 2001), and they have also found that the effects sizes of extralegal characteristics like race actually declined as a result (Bushway and Piehl, 2001). However, our dummy coding of criminal history did not increase model fit, and the proportion of explained variance in our sentencing outcome remained virtually unchanged for these non-guidelines data (i.e., Nagelkerke R 2 for both models was .71).…”

Cross-Jurisdictional Disposition Variability Under Sentencing Guidelines

“…Second, previous research has shown the guideline midpoint to be inappropriate for Pennsylvania sentencing data (Ulmer, 2000). However, we recognize that a nonlinear relationship may also exist between these axes (Engen & Gainey, 2000b;Ulmer, 1997). Therefore, to statistically test and account for this, we include a modified interaction term in addition to modeling their independent effects.…”

“…Notably, this research does not use the guideline range midpoint (Engen & Gainey, 2000b) for two reasons. First, the two guideline grid axes are designed to be the key predictors of sentencing outcomes under these guidelines (Merritt et al, 2004;PSC, 1997), beyond any independent impact their intersection (e.g., the guideline range midpoint) might wield.…”