This study used hierarchical logistic modeling to examine the impact of legal, extralegal, and contextual variables on the decision to sentence felons to prison in a sample of large urban counties in 1996. None of the four contextual (county-level) variables—the level of crime, unemployment rate, racial composition, and region—increased the likelihood of a prison sentence, but 10 case-level factors, both legal and extralegal, and several macro-micro interaction terms were influential. These results demonstrate the importance of considering smaller geographic units (i.e., counties instead of states) and controlling for case-level factors in research on interjurisdictional differences in prison use.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Arvanites, T. M. (1992). Increasing imprisonment: A function of crime or socio-economic factors? American Journal of Criminal Justice, 37(1), 19-38.
2.
Beck, A. J. (2000). Prison and jail inmates at midyear 1999 (Bureau of Justice Statistics bulletin). Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.
3.
Beck, A. J., & Harrison, P. M. (2001). Prisoners in 2000 (Bureau of Justice Statistics bulletin). Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Britt, C. L. (2000). Social context and racial disparities in punishment decisions. Justice Quarterly, 17(4), 707-732.
6.
Brown, J. M., Langan, P. A., & Levin, D. J. (1999). Felony sentences in state courts, 1996 (Bureau of Justice Statistics bulletin). Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.
7.
Carroll, L., & Doubet, M. (1983). U.S. social structure and imprisonment. Criminology, 21(3), 449-456.
8.
Chiricos, T. G., & Crawford, C. (1995). Race and imprisonment: A contextual assessment of the evidence. In D. F. Hawkins (Ed.), Ethnicity, race and crime: Perspectives across time and place (pp. 281-309). Albany: State University of New York Press.
9.
Crawford, C., Chiricos, T., & Kleck, G. (1998). Race, racial threat, and sentencing of habitual offenders. Criminology, 36(3), 481-512.
10.
Dixon, J. (1995). The organizational context of criminal sentencing. American Journal of Sociology, 100(5), 1157-1198.
11.
Eisenstein, J., Flemming, R. B., & Nardulli, P. F. (1999). The contours of justice: Communities and their courts. New York: University Press of America.
12.
Eisenstein, J., & Jacob, H. (1977). Felony justice: An organizational analysis of criminal courts. Boston: Little, Brown.
13.
Frase, R. (1993). Implementing commission-based sentencing guidelines: The lessons of the first ten years in Minnesota. Cornell Journal of Law & Public Policy, 2(2), 279-337.
14.
Gilks, W. R., Richardson, S., & Spiegelhalter, D. J. (1996). Markov chain Monte Carlo methods in practice. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman and Hall.
15.
Greenberg, D., & West, V. (2001). State prison populations and their growth, 1971-1991. Criminology, 39(3), 615-654.
16.
Hart, T. C., & Reaves, B. A. (1999) Felony defendants in large urban counties. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.
17.
Huang, W. S., Finn, M. A., Ruback, R. B., & Friedmann, R. R. (1996). Individual and contextual influences on sentence lengths: Examining political conservatism. The Prison Journal, 76, 398-419.
18.
Maguire, K., & Pastore, A. (Eds.). (1999). Sourcebook of criminal justice statistics—1998. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.
19.
McCarthy, S. R. (1990). A micro-level analysis of social structure and social control: Intrastate use of jail and prison confinement. Justice Quarterly, 7(2), 326-340.
20.
McGarrell, E. F. (1993). Institutional theory and the stability of a conflict model of the incarceration rate. Justice Quarterly, 10(1), 7-28.
21.
Mears, D. P. (1998). The sociology of sentencing: Reconceptualizing decision making processes and outcomes. Law and Society Review, 32(3), 667-724.
22.
Mears, D. P., & Field, S. H. (2000). Theorizing sanctioning in a criminalized juvenile court. Criminology, 38(4), 983-1020.
23.
Michalowski, R. J., & Pearson, M. A. (1990). Punishment and social structure at the state level: A cross-sectional comparison of 1970 and 1980. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 27, 52-78.
24.
Morris, N., & Tonry, M. (1990). Between prison and probation: Intermediate punishments in a rational sentencing system. New York: Oxford University Press.
25.
Myers, M. A., & Talarico, S. M. (1987). The social contexts of criminal sentencing. New York: Springer-Verlag.
26.
Rasbash, J., Browne, W., Goldstein, H., Yang, M., Plewis, I., Healy, M., et al. (2000). A user’s guide to MLwiN (2nd ed.). London: Institute of Education.
27.
Raudenbush, S., Byrk, A., Cheong, Y., & Congdon, R. (2001). Hierarchical linear and nonlinear modeling (2nd ed.). Chicago: Scientific Software International.
28.
Rountree, P. W., Land, K. C., & Miethe, T. D. (1994). Macro-micro integration in the study of victimization: A hierarchical logistic model analysis across Seattle neighborhoods. Criminology, 32(3), 387-414.
29.
Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1993). Structural variations in juvenile court processing: Inequality, the underclass, and social control. Law and Society Review, 27(2), 285-311.
30.
Silver, E. (2000). Extending social disorganization theory: A multilevel approach to the study of violence among persons with mental illnesses. Criminology, 38(4), 1043-1074.
31.
Snell, T. L. (2000). Capital punishment 1999. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.
32.
Spiegelhalter, D. J., Thomas, A., & Best, N. G. (1999). Win BUGS version 1.2 user manual. Cambridge, UK: MRC Biostatistics Unit.
33.
Spohn, C., & Holleran, D. (2000). The imprisonment penalty paid by young, unemployed Black and Hispanic male offenders. Criminology, 38(1), 281-306.
34.
Steffensmeier, D., Kramer J., & Streifel, C. (1993). Gender and imprisonment decisions. Criminology, 31(3), 411-446.
35.
Sullivan, M. L. (1989). Getting paid: Youth, crime and work in the inner city. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
36.
Taggart, W. A., & Winn, R. G. (1993). Imprisonment in the American states. Social Science Quarterly, 74(4), 736-749.
37.
Taylor, M. C. (1998). How White attitudes vary with the racial composition of local populations: Numbers count. American Sociological Review, 63, 512-535.
38.
Tonry, M. (1999). Why are U.S. incarceration rates so high? Crime & Delinquency, 45, 419-437.
39.
Ulmer, J. T. (1997). The social worlds of sentencing: Court communities under sentencing guidelines. Albany: State University of New York Press.
40.
Ulmer, J. T., & Kramer, J. H. (1996). Court communities under sentencing guidelines: Dilemmas of formal rationality and sentencing disparity. Criminology, 34(3), 383-407.
41.
Weidner, R. R., & Frase, R. (2001). A county-level comparison of the propensity to sentence felons to prison. International Journal of Comparative Criminology, 1(1), 1-22.
42.
Wong, G. Y., & Mason, W. M. (1985). The hierarchical logistic regression model for multilevel analysis. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 80, 513-524.
43.
Wooldredge, J., Griffin, T., & Pratt, T. (2001). Considering hierarchical models for research on inmate behavior: Predicting misconduct with multilevel data. Justice Quarterly, 18(1), 203-231.
