James M. Anderson (Defender Association of Philadelphia) Jeffrey R. Kling (Princeton University and NBER) Kate Stith (Yale Law School)
Abstract
This paper evaluates the impact of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines on inter-judge sentencing disparity, which is defined as the differences in average nominal prison sentence lengths for comparable caseloads assigned to different judges. This disparity is measured as the dispersion of a random effect in a zero-inflated negative binomial model. The results show that the expected difference between two typical judges in the average sentence length was about 17 percent (or 4.9 months) in 1986-87 prior to the Guidelines, and fell to about 11 percent (or 3.9 months) from 1988-93 during the early years of the Guidelines. We have not sought to measure the effect of parole in the pre-Guidelines period, other sources of disparity such as prosecutorial discretion, or the proportionality of punishment under the Guidelines as compared with the pre-Guidelines era.
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Publisher Info
Paper provided by Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Discussion Papers in Economics. in its series Working Papers with number
153.
Find related papers by JEL classification: K4 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior C5 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling