White-Collar Crime and Punishment: The Impact of Legal and Extralegal Factors

• In Event: White-Collar Crime at 75: Sanctioning

Abstract

Research on sentencing outcomes receives a great deal of attention from criminal justice scholars, however the focus has been primarily on traditional street crimes. In light of recent changes in laws regulating judicial discretion, corporate activity, and a series of major incidents of white-collar crime and corporate malfeasance, further empirical analysis of sentencing related to white-collar crimes is an important area of focus. This paper contributes to prior research in two ways: (1) an empirical assessment of whether sentencing outcomes for white-collar offenders charged in federal district courts became more severe in response to the economic climate; (2) an examination of variations in outcomes across type of white-collar crime, as well as the influences of legal and extralegal offender characteristics. To assess these questions this study uses data from Federal Justice Statistics Program, combining charging data from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts and sentencing data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Author

• Alexander Testa, University of Maryland