Media Mentions and Sentencing Severity: Examining Nonviolent Offences in Queensland

• In Event: Media Depictions of Crime Perpetration: Bias, Stereotypes, and Trends

Abstract

Unlike juries, judges are not sequestered, and the effect of bias on discretionary actors such as them is well known, bias that is often fuelled by the media and can contribute to lifelong outcomes for offenders caught in the system. This is particularly relevant in jurisdictions such as Australia, and within offence types like drugs or break-and-enter, where sentencing guidelines for judges give considerable room for discretion. Yet, there has been little inquiry in Australia into how this bias is conferred onto the decision makers and the lag in its uptake. In this project I seek to understand the extent to which topic trends in news/print media are associated with patterns in sentencing outcomes for drugs and break-and-enter offences over time. This will take the form of a time-series analysis of month-to-month trends in the count of offence mentions in traditional print media and the ratio of finalised custodial to non-custodial sentences, to examine the correlation between trends and identify potential temporal lags between the trends. The findings of this study will help us to better understand the implicit role of media rhetoric in sentencing outcomes with important implications sentencing policy.

Authors

• Jeremy Verrier, University of Queensland

• Renee Zahnow, University of Queensland