Award Date

5-1-2020

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Sociology

First Committee Member

Andrew Spivak

Second Committee Member

David Dickens

Third Committee Member

Melissa Rorie

Fourth Committee Member

Barb Brents

Number of Pages

107

Abstract

Since the turn of the century, sentencing research has consistently shown that certain aspects of the social context generally condition individual-level sentencing variations. I further explore this postulation in assessing how legal changes affect courtroom decisions; and in analyzing how extra-legal offender characteristics and judicial attributes influence the likelihood and length of white-collar incarceration sentences. The study hypothesized an emergent sociotemporal trend, largely driven by implementation of white-collar sentencing legislation and a return to judicial discretion, whereby white-collar offenders sentenced in the years post-Booker would receive more lenient punishments (i.e., less likely to be incarcerated and shorter incarceration sentences) than those before the Booker decision. The study also hypothesized that the effect of extra-legal and judicial attributes on sentencing outcomes would be most pronounced post-Booker when Guideline statutes were deemed advisory. Results for binary logistic, OLS, hierarchical logistic, and hierarchical linear regression are discussed, as well as general implications for the study of white-collar offending.

Keywords

Booker; Quantitative methods; Sentencing; White-collar crime

Disciplines

Criminology | Criminology and Criminal Justice | Sociology

File Format

pdf

File Size

0.997 MB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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