Scaling Punishment Severity

Scaling Punishment Severity

Stephanie Wallace, from the Lancaster University, made a contribution to the 2012 Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology, in the category “Punishment and its alternatives,” under the title “Scaling Punishment Severity”. Here is the abstract: This paper will present the preliminary results of research aimed at constructing a ‘Punishment Severity Scale’. Unlike previous research, the methodology employs real sentencing data and will attempt to control for legal variables known to affect the sentencing decision making process, such as the offender’s plea, previous convictions and previous disposals etc. The research uses Probation data from England and Wales known as the Offender Assessment System (OASys) data, which has been merged with data from the Police National Computer (PNC). Taking 63,794 offences and court disposals over 29,688 separate sentencing occasions, we were able to model offences and their resulting disposals to create a single scale measuring punishment severity. This work corresponds with the Sentencing and Penal Decision Making working group stream.[rtbs name=”criminology”]

Resources

See Also

Further Reading

• “Scaling Punishment Severity”, by Stephanie Wallace (Proceedings)