NCJ Number
96013
Date Published
Unknown
Length
30 pages
Annotation
Presented is a comparison of two scales for assessing the seriousness of an offense: the Severity of Crime Scale and the Racine Offense Seriousness Scale, the former representing a survey approach to scaling, the latter a legalistic approach.
Abstract
Results of analyses show a strong positive relationship between the survey and the legalistic approach to the scaling of offense seriousness (Tau = .592). This may indicate some agreement between the popular opinion of contact seriousness and the legal system appraisal, even given a lag problem between changing popular moral standards and their implementation through the criminal justice system. When the relationship between people's view of severity and rank-order of sanctions was considered, evidence of a relationship was not as apparent and depended to some extent on the rank of serious contact types and severity of sanctions. A further analysis of the relationships among perceived seriousness of the offense and severity of sanction as viewed by sanctioned offenders produced inconsistent results, which suggests that further research is needed on factors related to decisionmaking in the justice system. Tabular data are provided.