Community Variation in the Disposition of Criminal Cases: The Role of Social, Cultural, and Political Context

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SES-0451848Eric BaumerUniversity of Missouri Saint LouisThis project will examine whether the outcomes of criminal cases are shaped by features of the communities in which they are processed. Specifically, drawing from a variety of theoretical perspectives, the project examines whether legal sanctions applied to criminal defendants are more severe in jurisdictions characterized by higher levels of fear, greater public support for punitive measures of formal social control, a larger concentration of political conservatives, higher or lower levels of social capital, and relatively more whites who perceive blacks to be threatening or who hold prejudiced attitudes toward blacks. In addition to examining the direct effects of these community attributes, the project will explore whether they help to interpret the effects on legal outcomes of structural factors such as population composition, racial inequality, segregation, religious composition, region, and rates of violence. The influence of these aspects of community social, cultural, and political context on felony case outcomes will be examined at four stages of the criminal justice process: prosecutorial screening, the pretrial detention decision, adjudication, and sentencing. These issues will be examined with multilevel and nested logit regression analyses of data on felony cases from the State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS) program and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) murder arrest file, and community-level (i.e., county and Metropolitan Area) data from the General Social Survey (GSS) and a variety of other sources that capture the legal, social, cultural, and political context in which these cases were processed. The project contributes significantly to existing research by developing and incorporating measures of the proximate community conditions believed to influence outcomes at various stages of the criminal justice process and by evaluating some of the most often stated reasons for why more distal community structural factors are believed to shape those outcomes. The project holds promise for enhancing our understanding of geographic differences in the disposition of criminal cases and for developing and modifying theories of the application of law. The project will yield several broader impacts. The project will integrate research and educational activities by facilitating the training and mentoring of a graduate student who will participate in all phases of the research and who will help plan and teach graduate and undergraduate methods courses organized around the themes examined in the proposed study. These courses will significantly enhance the social science curriculum at the host institution, and they will help broaden the participation in research of historically underrepresented groups, particularly women and African Americans. The courses will be developed and taught with the dual objectives of engaging students in the specific research issues addressed in the project and of stimulating and encouraging students to consider pursuing careers in research and teaching. The project also will yield broader impacts for the infrastructure for social science research by using the GSS in an innovative way to construct more direct measures of the community-level conditions emphasized in the theoretical literature.