Symposium on Crime & Justice: The Past and Future of Empirical Sentencing Research

最初，量刑仅指法官在量刑听证会上的行动，但该领域已经认识到，刑事司法系统中行为者的所有行动都对最终惩罚结果起作用。从这个角度来看，量刑研究可以被认为包括所有的“量刑”决定，包括指控，辩诉交易，甚至假释决定。近年来，该领域的主要研究模式是对定罪数据进行复杂的统计分析。尽管这种量刑研究的主要范式取得了令人印象深刻的成功，但犯罪学学者们越来越意识到，这种特殊的方法已经停滞不前。本次研讨会旨在通过积极联系从事量刑研究的学者，帮助确定在这一领域工作的新途径。进一步的意图是更明确地将这一领域的实证研究人员与该领域的决策者（例如，量刑委员会、法官、立法者）联系起来，并将初级学者和来自代表性不足群体的学者纳入更广泛的量刑学者群体。

Initially, sentencing was meant to refer only to the actions of the judge at the sentencing hearing, but the field has come to understand that all actions by actors in the criminal justice system have a role to play in final punishment outcomes. From this perspective, sentencing research can be thought to incoroporate all "sentencing" decisions, including charging, plea bargains, and even parole release decisions. The predominant mode of research in the field in recent years has been the sophisticated statistical analysis of conviction data. Despite the impressive success of this main paradigm of sentencing research, there is a growing sense among scholars in criminology that this particular approach has stalled. This symposium is intended to help identify new avenues for work in this area, in part by actively connecting the range of scholars engaging in sentencing research. A further intention is to more explicitly connect empirical researchers in this field to the policymakers in this area (e.g., sentencing commissions, judges, legislators) and to integrate junior scholars and scholars from underrepresented groups into the broader community of sentencing scholars.