The Effects of Sanction Intensity on Criminal Conduct - JDAI Helpdesk

It assumes that if <strong>of</strong>fenders consider a particular crime type to be serious, they will only
be drawn to it as their <strong>of</strong>fending career escalates. Thus, the sequencing <strong>of</strong> crime types
over the life course provides insight into which <strong>of</strong>fenses <strong>of</strong>fenders perceive as more or
less serious. We do not examine this approach in our paper because we lack full lifetime
<strong>of</strong>fending data for our sample, so the utility <strong>of</strong> the developmental focus is limited. <strong>The</strong>
quality <strong>of</strong> the data do not justify the complexity <strong>of</strong> the methods.
Our operationalization <strong>of</strong> substantive severity is straightforward. We simply
classify each charge as a serious or non-serious <strong>of</strong>fense according to the definition <strong>of</strong>
severity used in the prediction model (see above). We also compare this definition <strong>of</strong>
severity with the standard UCR distinction between serious and less serious <strong>of</strong>fending,
which includes more <strong>of</strong>fenses than the Philadelphia model’s distinction.
We propose a simpler method for analyzing economic severity.
<strong>The</strong> more
complex cost models may not be well suited to our data. Because our sample has already
been deemed low-risk, in part because <strong>of</strong> their non-serious <strong>of</strong>fending backgrounds,
serious <strong>of</strong>fenses will be rare events.
Thus, it makes sense to simply dichotomize
<strong>of</strong>fending history and outcomes into serious/non-serious rather than attempting to create
more detailed categories. However, an economic severity rating is more difficult to
dichotomize, beyond the rudimentary approach <strong>of</strong> assigning an arbitrary dollar value as a
threshold between serious and non-serious <strong>of</strong>fending. <strong>The</strong> studies that do provide U.S.
dollar estimates for crime types (e.g., Cohen, 1988; Miller, Cohen, & Wiersema, 1996)
provide various formulas for assigning costs, and largely focus on the most serious
crimes, so it is difficult to obtain estimates for the lower-level <strong>of</strong>fenses that are more
prevalent in our sample. For example, cost estimates set out in Cohen (2000) contain no
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