Jeffery T. Ulmer

Sentencing disparity and departures from guidelines

Unwarranted sentencing disparity, a long-standing concern for sociologists studying criminal sentencing, helped to stimulate reforms of sentencing such as sentencing guidelines. Guidelines, however, do not assure the elimination or even the reduction of sentencing disparity. Courts have the discretion to deviate from guideline recommendations, and these departures become a potential source of unwarranted disparity. Therefore we examine five years of recent sentencing data from Pennsylvania, focusing on the degree to which sentences that depart from the states guideline recommendations involve extralegal differences. We find that legally prescribed factors such as offense type/severity and criminal history are the primary predictors of departure decisions, but that departures from guidelines are also the locus of significant extralegal differences involving gender, race, and mode of conviction (guilty plea vs trial). We conclude by discussing the dilemmas these extralegal differences present for sentencin...

Recent Developments and New Directions in Sentencing Research

Research on criminal sentencing, particularly on various types of disparity therein, has been an active field of inquiry for decades. This paper provides a conceptual survey of research on non-capital sentencing outcomes since 2000. I first look backward at the research agenda posed by reviews in the early 1980s, and in 2000. I then discuss theoretical developments in the study of sentencing in the 1990s and 2000s. I then provide an overview of recent sentencing research focused on the following: (1) court organizational and social contexts, (2) individual courtroom workgroup members, (3) disparity conditional on intersecting defendant characteristics, (4) victim characteristics, and (5) earlier case processing events and decisions. I then outline several directions for moving sentencing research forward into the next decade.

Racial/Ethnic Threat and Federal Sentencing

This study examines whether federal sentencing decisions are influenced by the racial/ethnic composition of federal court districts. Multilevel models of individual cases within federal judicial districts show that Black defendants receive moderately longer sentences than Whites, and that Hispanics and Whites receive similar sentences. These race/ethnicity effects on sentence length are found to vary across federal districts but not as predicted by racial threat theory. In contrast to racial threat predictions, Black sentence lengths are not significantly conditioned by the district Black population. Contrary to racial threat predictions, Hispanic defendants receive the harshest sentences when they account for the smallest share of the population (1 to 3 percent) and the most lenient sentences when they make up more sizable shares of district populations (more than 27 percent). Our results indicate that racial threat theory provides an inadequate explanation of how social contexts influence the federal sentencing of Blacks and Hispanics.

The Use and Transformation of Formal Decision-Making Criteria: Sentencing Guidelines, Organizational Contexts, and Case Processing Strategies

Recent sociological research in organizations has emphasized the “filtering” of externally-imposed formal policies and rules through local organizational cultures and strategic interaction processes. This type of generic organizational process assumes special importance for courts and sentencing, subjects of policy-oriented and social problems discourse for over three decades. Eisenstein and associates (1977, 1988; Flemming, Nardulli and Eisenstein 1992) point out that the contexts of local “court communities” and the formal and informal case processing norms of courtroom workgroups are at least as important as formal laws and state-level policies in determining “contours” of criminal justice. Our study focuses on the use and transformation of sentencing guidelines in the interorganizational relations and workgroup case processing strategies in local courts. We draw on the organizational concepts of “embeddedness” (Perrucci 1994) and “properties in use” (Peyrot 1995) of formal decision-making tools to frame our analysis. We present qualitative interview and field data on organizational contexts and case processing strategies from three different-sized county trial courts in Pennsylvania, a state whose courts have operated under sentencing guidelines for over a decade. Among the highlights of the analysis are our findings that DAs offices can use sentencing guidelines as management tools, judges can use them to legitimate their sentencing practices in political disputes, and both prosecutors and defense attorneys use them as important tools of uncertainty reduction in their guilty plea strategies. More generally, we argue that the implimentation of externally imposed formal rules and decision-making criteria depends on local relationships, activities, and informal decision-making criteria.

Trial Penalties in Federal Sentencing: Extra-Guidelines Factors and District Variation

The guarantee of the right to a jury trial lies at the heart of the principles that underlie the American criminal justice systems commitment to due process of law. We investigate the differential sentencing of those who plead guilty and those convicted by trial in U.S. District Courts. We first investigate how much of any federal plea/trial sentencing differences are accounted for by substantial assistance to law enforcement, acceptance of responsibility, obstruction of justice, and other Guideline departures. Second, we investigate how such differences vary according to offense and defendant characteristics, as well as court caseloads and trial rates. We use federal sentencing data for fiscal years 2000–02, along with aggregate data on federal district court caseload features. We find that meaningful trial penalties exist after accounting for Guidelines‐based rationales for differentially sentencing those convicted by guilty plea versus trial. Higher district court caseload pressure is associated with greater trial penalties, while higher district trial rates are associated with lesser trial penalties. In addition, trial penalties are lower for those with more substantial criminal histories, and black men. Trial penalties proportionately increase, however, as Guideline minimum sentencing recommendations increase. We also supplement our analysis with interview and survey data from federal district court participants, which provide insights into the plea reward/trial penalty process, and also suggest important dimensions of federal court trial penalties that we cannot measure.

The 'Liberation' of Federal Judges' Discretion in the Wake of the Booker/Fanfan Decision: Is There Increased Disparity and Divergence Between Courts?

The US Sentencing Guidelines are among the most ambitious attempts in history to control sentencing discretion. However, a major sea change occurred in January of 2005, when the US Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Booker and Fanfan, that in order to be constitutional, the federal guidelines must be advisory rather than presumptive. The impact of the Booker/Fanfan decisions on interjurisdictional variation and sentencing disparity is an opportunity to examine the issue of whether the increased opportunity to sentence according to substantively rational criteria entails increased extralegal disparity. We draw on a conceptualization of courts as communities and a focal concerns model of sentencing decisions to frame expectations about federal sentencing in the wake of Booker/Fanfan. We test these expectations using USSC data on federal sentencing outcomes from four time periods: prior to the 2003 PROTECT Act, the period governed by the PROTECT Act, post-Booker/Fanfan, and post-Gall v US. In general, we find that extralegal disparity and between-district variation in the effects of extralegal factors on sentencing have not increased post-Booker and Gall. We conclude that allowing judges greater freedom to exercise substantive rationality does not necessarily result in increased extralegal disparity.

Religion, Self Control, and Substance Use

Previous research has examined a number of mechanisms through which religion might have an indirect influence on substance use. One potential intervening mechanism that has received little empirical attention is self control. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) we (1) examine the association between religion and self control, (2) determine if self control mediates the effect of religiosity on substance use, and (3) determine if the effect of self control on substance use varies depending on adolescents’ religiosity. The results suggest that religious youth exhibit higher levels of self control. Also, self control partially mediates the effect of adolescents’ religiosity on marijuana use and drinking. The only evidence we find for an interaction between self control and religiosity suggests self control has a moderately greater effect on alcohol use among those of low, rather than medium or high, religiosity.

Religious Involvement and Dynamics of Marijuana Use: Initiation, Persistence, and Desistence

Studies that examine the effects of adolescent religiosity on the initiation of, persistence in, and desistence from delinquency are rare. Yet, religion may differentially affect dimensions of delinquency in the early life course. Therefore, using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we examine the relationship between measures of adolescent religion, as well as changes in religious involvement, and later patterns of marijuana use. We also examine the extent to which religious effects, if any, are mediated by key predictors of delinquency drawn from prominent criminological theories. The results suggest that the primary effect of religion on marijuana use is to prevent its initiation in the first place. Only part of religions preventative effect on initiation is mediated by social bonds, delinquent peers, or self control. Although religious youth are less likely to ever use marijuana, adolescent religious involvement does not significantly predict desistence from marijuana use.

Do Moral Communities Play a Role in Criminal Sentencing? Evidence from Pennsylvania

Religion and social control have been a sociological concern since Durkheim and Weber, and the relationship between religion and punishment has long been the subject of speculation. However, surprisingly little empirical research exists on the role of religion or religious context in criminal justice, and almost no research on the role of religious context on actual sentencing practices. We conceptualize the potential relationships between religious context and sentencing severity by drawing from the focal concerns and court community perspectives in the sentencing literature and from the moral communities theory developed by Rodney Stark. We suspect that Christian moral communities might shape notions of perceived blameworthiness for court community actors. Such moral communities might also affect notions of community protection—affecting perceptions of dangerousness, or perhaps rehabilitation, and might influence practical constraints/consequences (e.g., local political ramifications of harsh or lenient sentences). We examine these questions with a set of hierarchical models using sentencing data from Pennsylvania county courts and data on the religious composition of Pennsylvania counties from the Associated Religion Data Archives. We find that county Christian religious homogeneity increases the likelihood of incarceration. In addition, Christian homogeneity, as well as the prevalence of civically engaged denominations in a county condition the effects of important legally relevant determinants of incarceration. Furthermore, we find evidence that Christian homogeneity activates the effect of local Republican electoral dominance on incarceration. We argue that Christian homogeneity affects sentencing practices primarily through local political processes that shape the election of judges and prosecutors.

Commitment, Deviance, and Social Control

This article extends earlier work (Ulmer 1994) in applying Johnsons (1991) threefold commitment framework to deviance and social control. The central individual-level theories of deviance (differential association/social learning, opportunity, social control, and labeling) share the generic sociological goal of theorizing continuity in lines of action. This suggests the centrality of the concept of commitment, and in fact the concept is used throughout the study of deviance and social control. The threefold framework provides a superior conceptualization of commitment for the field of deviance. In addition, it integrates insights from the central deviance theories and directs attention to a wide variety of un- and underexplored directions for further research in deviance and social control. In addition, I briefly discuss broader implications of the commitment framework for other areas of inquiry, such as the study of social protest and the sociology of organizations.