Federal Sentencing Guidelines and United States v. Booker: Social Context and Sentencing Disparity

Abstract

The United States v. Booker decision rendered Federal Sentencing Guidelines advisory rather than mandatory. In the context of this decision, this study examines both the direct influence of aggregate-level political, community, and administrative variables on sentencing outcomes, and the way that such characteristics might contextualize individual-level predictors. Using multi-level regression techniques, this study examines the role of aggregate-level variables on sentence length decisions across four distinct time periods. Moreover, this article also examines whether aggregate-level variables condition the effects of race/ethnicity on sentencing outcomes. Whereas the direct effects of aggregate-level variables on sentencing outcomes are generally limited to political climate effects, there is evidence that political climate and other aggregatelevel measures contextualize individual-level race/ethnicity effects. Future research should seek to better understand the specific mechanisms behind these relationships.

Structural Gender Equality and Federal Sentencing Outcomes: A Test of the Ameliorative and Backlash Hypotheses

“… 2. We collect our district-level measures at the county level, and then aggregate them up into districts, because counties naturally fit within the federal districts (e.g., no county spills across multiple districts). While this technique will produce some level of measurement error, this is the most appropriate way to match Census data to federal districts, and previous studies of sentencing and social context have used this technique (see Feldmeyer & Ulmer, 2011; Kim, Cano, Kim, & Spohn, 2016; Nowacki, 2018). …”

Police discretion, organizational characteristics, and traffic stops: An analysis of racial disparity in illinois

“…The minority-group threat hypothesis has been examined across a number of criminal justice outcomes. This body of research finds that large and growing non-white population size is associated with arrest decisions (Eitle and Monahan, 2009), police force strength (Carroll and Jackson, 1982; Jackson and Carroll, 1981; Jacobs, 1979), citizen complaints (Holmes, 2000; Smith BW and Holmes, 2003, 2014), sentencing outcomes (Nowacki, 2018; Wang and Mears, 2010), and police use of deadly force (Jacobs and O’Brien, 1998; Liska and Yu, 1992; Nowacki, 2015; Smith BW, 2004; Sorensen et al, 1993; Willits and Nowacki, 2014). Fewer studies have examined the link between racial composition and traffic enforcement (see Novak and Chamlin, 2012 for an exception).…”

Inter‐judicial differences in approaching technical violations: Examining the interaction of judge and compliance issue for domestic violence probationers

“…Much of the literature on contextual variation in court processing has focused on inter‐district variation in sentencing practices (e.g., Johnson & DiPietro, 2012; Nowacki, 2018). This line of research has typically found wide variation in sentencing, which is impacted by urbanization, caseload, political pressure, and macro socio‐economic factors (Baumer & Martin, 2013; Johnson & DiPietro, 2012).…”