Do moral intuitions influence judges' sentencing decisions? A multilevel study of criminal court sentencing in Pennsylvania.

The influence of judges' personal moral values on their sentencing decisions is of longstanding interest to researchers and the public. Few studies, however, have examined this influence empirically. Using a unique data set that combines a survey of 81 criminal court judges with archival data on their 40,385 criminal sentences over a 2-year period, and drawing on Moral Foundations Theory, we hypothesize that judges with strong care and fairness intuitions will sentence defendants less severely while judges with strong loyalty, authority, and sanctity intuitions will sentence defendants more severely. We further hypothesize that these effects will be heightened when the defendant is from a racial minority group. Results show that sentencing outcomes are largely independent of judges' moral intuitions, except that fairness intuitions tend to increase leniency, especially when the defendant is Black, and sanctity intuitions tend to decrease leniency. Implications for future research on sentencing are discussed.

Race and the Religious Contexts of Violence: Linking Religion and White, Black, and Latino Violent Crime.

Research has demonstrated that concentrated disadvantage and other measures are strongly associated with aggregate-level rates of violence, including across racial and ethnic groups. Less studied is the impact of cultural factors, including religious contextual measures. The current study addresses several key gaps in prior literature by utilizing race/ethnic-specific arrest data from California, New York, and Texas paired with religious contextual data from the Religious Congregations and Memberships Survey (RCMS). Results suggest that, net of important controls, (1) religious contextual measures have significant crime-reducing associations with violence, (2) these associations are race/ethnic-specific, and (3) religious contextual measures moderate the criminogenic association between disadvantage and violence for Blacks. Implications for future research are discussed.

Racial/Ethnic Composition and Violence: Size-of-Place Variations in Percent Black and Percent Latino Effects on Violence Rates.

According to racial invariance positions and mainstream sociological perspectives on race and crime, race differences in structural conditions should account for most if not all of the racial composition (or percent black) effect on aggregate-level violence rates. However, prior research (mostly conducted prior to 1990) generally provides mixed or contrary evidence for this position, showing instead that greater concentrations of blacks are linked to increased violence even after accounting for racial differences in socioeconomic conditions. The current study uses recent data and a novel unit of analysis to go beyond extant research in two ways. First, we include percent Latino in our examination of the extent to which both racial and ethnic composition effects on violent crime rates are mediated by racial/ethnic disparities in socioeconomic disadvantage. Second, we test whether racial/ethnic composition effects are conditioned by size of place, through the use census places as a uniquely varying unit of analysis. We find that both black and Latino composition effects are partly explained by controlling for structural conditions (especially structural disadvantage), but this characterizes smaller places much more than the largest, most urbanized places.

Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Structural Disadvantage and Crime: White, Black, and Hispanic Comparisons.

OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study is to advance knowledge on racial/ethnic disparities in violence and the structural sources of those disparities. We do so by extending scarce and limited research exploring the relationship between race/ethnic gaps in disadvantage and differences in violent crime across groups. METHODS: Using census place-level data from California and New York, we construct White, Black, and Hispanic "gap" measures that take as a given the existence of disparities across race/ethnic groups in structural disadvantage and crime and subsequently utilize seemingly unrelated regression models to assess the extent to which gaps in disadvantage are predictive of gaps in homicide and index violence. RESULTS: Our results suggest that (1) there is considerable heterogeneity in the size of White-Black, White-Hispanic, and Black-Hispanic gaps in structural disadvantage and crime and (2) that race/ethnic disparities in structural disadvantage, particularly poverty and female headship, are positively associated with race/ethnic gaps in homicide and index violence. CONCLUSION: In light of recent scholarship on the racial invariance hypothesis and on the relationship between structural inequality and crime, the current study demonstrates that disparities in disadvantage, particularly family structure and poverty, are important in driving racial and ethnic disparities in crime.

Do Moral Communities Play a Role in Criminal Sentencing? Evidence From Pennsylvania.

Religion and social control have been a sociological concern since Durkheim and Weber, and the relationship between religion and punishment has long been the subject of speculation. However, surprisingly little empirical research exists on the role of religion or religious context in criminal justice, and almost no research on the role of religious context on actual sentencing practices. We conceptualize the potential relationships between religious context and sentencing severity by drawing from the focal concerns and court community perspectives in the sentencing literature and moral communities theory developed by Rodney Stark. We suspect that Christian moral communities might shape notions of perceived blameworthiness for court community actors. Such moral communities might also affect notions of community protection - affecting perceptions of dangerousness, or perhaps rehabilitation, and might influence practical constraints/consequences (e.g., local political ramifications of harsh or lenient sentences). We examine these questions using a set of hierarchical models using sentencing data from Pennsylvania county courts and data on the religious composition of Pennsylvania counties from the Associated Religion Data Archives. We find that county Christian religious homogeneity increases the likelihood of incarceration. In addition, Christian homogeneity as well as the prevalence of civically engaged denominations in a county condition the effects of important legally relevant determinants of incarceration. Furthermore, we find evidence that Christian homogeneity activates the effect of local Republican electoral dominance on incarceration. We argue that Christian homogeneity effects sentencing practices primarily through local political processes that shape the election of judges and prosecutors.