The sociology of sentencing : Reconceptualizing decisionmaking processes and outcomes

Research on juvenile and adult sentencing has been characterized by theoretical, methodological, and empirical limitations that preclude adequate description, prediction, or assessment of decisionmaking processes and outcomes. Five limitations are prominent: emphasis on atheoretical, empirical attempts, generally unsuccessful, to increase predictive accuracy; limited conceptualizations of dependent variables (e.g., incarceration versus nonincarceration); overreliance on individual, offender-level data with minimal reference to victims, practitioners, or contextual factors; failure to incorporate analytically multiple research methods; and inattention to intended and unintended uses and effects of sentencing. These limitations can be highlighted by focusing on a context-juvenile justice-in which the goals of sentencing are varied, conflicting, and, due to recent reforms, changing. Using interview and survey data, the present research examines juvenile sentencing reform in Texas to highlight these limitations and to outline an analytical framework for improved description, modeling, and assessment of sentencing. Although societies have applied sanctions to criminal behavior for centuries), surprisingly we know little about when they are used, why they are used, and to what effect. Nowhere is this more true than in the world of juvenile justice sentencing. Here, research on the decisionmaking process, save for a handful of case studies (e.g., Cicourel 1976), has been restricted largely to atheoretical attempts to model sentencing outcomes through the use of official data. The primary advantage of such research is that it provides a basis for hypothesis testing and generalization. The primary disadvantage is that theoretical development is stifled by overreliance on existing official data and the restricted focus on individual-level factors, which most often reduces to the consideration of offender-level characteristics. In turn, by failing to consider the importance of contextual factors (Dixon 1995)indeed, by failing to consider the nature of the dependent variable of interest, sentencing outcomes (Cohen & Kluegel 1978)such research virtually ensures that not only will sentencing models be marked by large amounts of unexplained variance (Blumstein et al. 1983; Hagan 1994) but they also will be predicting outcomes that bear little connection to actual sentencing practices and their unintended effects (Myers & Talarico 1987). Although it is true that there are fundamental difficulties inherent in quantifying contextual effects (Sampson 1986; Myers & Talarico 1987; Dixon 1995; Sampson & Lauritsen 1997), these difficulties are insurmountable unless we know what ideally we want to quantify and to what end (Blumstein et al. 1983; Berk & Rossi 1990). One way to highlight these and other issues is to focus on a context in which the goals of sentencing are varied, conflicting, and changing. Recent attempts to "criminalize" the juvenile court (Feld 1993a; Howell 1996; Singer 1996a, 1996b; Torbet et al. 1996; Champion 1998), which traditionally has been characterized by an emphasis on rehabilitation and the "best interests" of the child (Platt 1977; Sutton 1988; Empey & Stafford 1991; Feld 1993a)l rather than punishment, provide such a context. Not only are the goals of juvenile justice in the 1990s more varied and conflicting than in the past, but they clearly are still changing. For example, many legislatures are giving primary emphasis to creating get-tough reforms that make it easier to sentence juveniles in adult courts (Singer 1993, 1996a; Sanborn 1994a; Howell 1996; Torbet et al. 1996). Nonetheless, many alternatives-indeed, far more alternatives than are often available in adult courts-still exist for sanctioning juvenile offenders (National Criminal Justice Association 1997; Champion 1998). These reforms are coming during a time when the merits of continuing to have a separate juvenile court are being debated (Dawson 1990a; Ainsworth 1991, 1995, 1996; Feld 1993b; Hirschi & Gottfredson 1993; U. …