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

密苏里州圣路易斯大学的Eric Baumer该项目将研究刑事案件的结果是否受到处理社区的特征的影响。具体地说，该项目从各种理论角度出发，考察了以下司法管辖区对刑事被告实施的法律制裁是否更严厉：恐惧程度更高、公众更支持正式社会控制的惩罚性措施、政治保守派更集中、社会资本水平更高或更低，以及相对更多的白人认为黑人具有威胁或对黑人持偏见态度。除了审查这些社区属性的直接影响外，该项目还将探讨它们是否有助于解释人口构成、种族不平等、种族隔离、宗教组成、地区和暴力比率等结构性因素对法律结果的影响。社区社会、文化和政治背景的这些方面对重罪案件结果的影响将在刑事司法程序的四个阶段进行审查：检察筛选、审前拘留决定、判决和判刑。这些问题将通过对来自州法院处理统计(SCPS)方案和司法统计局(BJS)谋杀逮捕文件的重罪案件数据、来自一般社会调查(GSS)的社区级(即县和大都市地区)数据以及各种其他来源的多层次和嵌套Logit回归分析来审查，这些来源反映了处理这些案件的法律、社会、文化和政治背景。该项目对现有研究作出了重大贡献，制定并纳入了据信会影响刑事司法程序不同阶段结果的最接近社区条件的衡量标准，并评估了一些最常被提及的原因，即为什么认为较远的社区结构因素会影响这些结果。该项目有望增进我们对刑事案件处理的地域差异的了解，并有助于发展和修改法律适用理论。该项目将产生几个更广泛的影响。该项目将整合研究和教育活动，帮助培训和指导一名研究生，该研究生将参与研究的所有阶段，并将帮助规划和教授围绕拟议研究中审查的主题组织的研究生和本科生方法课程。这些课程将大大加强主办机构的社会科学课程，并将有助于扩大历史上代表性不足的群体，特别是妇女和非裔美国人对研究的参与。这些课程的开发和教学将具有双重目标，即让学生参与项目中涉及的具体研究问题，以及激励和鼓励学生考虑从事研究和教学事业。该项目还将对社会科学研究的基础设施产生更广泛的影响，以创新的方式使用GSS来构建理论文献中强调的社区一级条件的更直接的衡量标准。

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.