Criminology & Criminal Justice Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2758
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Item Refocusing on Gender: Can Focal Concerns Theory Explain Gender Disparities in Sentencing Outcomes?(2015) Richardson, Rebecca; Johnson, Brian D; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Focal concerns theory argues that sentencing decisions reflect judges' beliefs about three primary considerations: blameworthiness of the defendant, protection of the community, and practical concerns. This perspective has been used as the theoretical foundation in an abundance of research and has proven particularly useful as a framework for explaining sentencing disparities related to offenders' demographic characteristics. Little work, however, has been able to incorporate perceptual measures of the three focal concerns into studies of sentencing outcomes and social inequality. This study uses a dataset that combines official county court records with case-level judicial surveys to conduct a more direct test of the focal concerns theory of judicial decision-making. It measures judicial assessments of each focal concern for each court case and then evaluates the extent to which these assessments explain gender disparities in two sentencing decisions: the decision to incarcerate, and the determination of sentence length.Item The Determinants of Court-Martial Decisions: An Empirical Investigation into the Air Force's Criminal Court Process(2015) Breen, Patricia D.; Johnson, Brian D; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In spite of many similarities with civilian criminal courts, public debate continues about further "civilianizing" the modern court-martial process to enhance legitimacy and reduce unwarranted disparities. Unfortunately, researchers and policymakers know very little about the determinants of court-martial decisions and the influence of military culture in the process. The current study begins to address this void in the empirical literature and informs contemporary reform discussions with its examination of the legal and extra-legal factors for court-martial decision outcomes at different stages of the process. With an extension of modern courts and sentencing theoretical perspectives, this study utilized multi-level modeling techniques with Air Force court-martial data from 2005-2008 to investigate the effects of individual-level factors as well as inter-court community and inter-judge disparities. The results revealed a number of findings that were contrary to civilian court research and theoretical expectations particularly for military-specific outcomes. Additionally, the analysis detected some evidence of disparities consistent with the influence of traditional military culture for decisions earlier in the court-martial process. The implications for the current public policy debate, courts and sentencing theoretical development, and future research are discussed.