Socioeconomic Status Of An Offender

I decided to do my third and final article review for this class over an article by Stewart J. D’ Alessio and Lisa Stoizenberg titled “Socioeconomic Status and the Sentencing of the Traditional Offender”. This article takes an in depth look at whether it not the socioeconomic status or how rich or poor someone is really can determine whether or not they are given a particular sentence for their crime. The main theme of this particular article deals mainly with how the socioeconomic status of an offender can directly impact the type of sentence they are given from the judge. The main topic that the reader can expect to see quite often throughout the article is how socioeconomic status plays in our sentencing structure throughout multiple crimes …show more content…
One of the bigger findings the authors found was that there was a very strong negative relationship with the socioeconomic status of an offender and the severity of the sentence they received for the crime of manslaughter. They found that often manslaughter cases are intraracial and intraclass, the victim often instigates the situation, and that the event pervades all social classes. With all of this in mind they believe that one would easily expect that one’s socioeconomic status would play a pretty significant role in a case dealing with manslaughter. They also found that socioeconomic status actually played a pretty significant role when an offender was sentenced for a moral offense crime. The authors found that the worse the offender’s socioeconomic status was the higher the sentence would they ultimately received. This particular finding was the one that I was looking for the most out of everything the authors posted under the findings portion of the article. This was the holy grail of the article and pretty much summed up the entire article that is the one sentence out of this entire article that should be highlighted and read over and over again by the reader’s. Socioeconomic status of offenders indeed does truly affect what type of sentence an offender will receive. One of the biggest findings of the entire study in my opinion as the fact that …show more content…
Both of the authors were able to present different statistics and facts that only strengthened their case and proved the point that they were trying to make. Like the authors stated at one point in the article, socioeconomic status and sentencing is a topic that has long been talked about and caused controversy over the years. However, these authors were able to look back at prior research and see what those people had found and base their research loosely of that to come full circle to their conclusion. Coming into reading this article I had an idea that socioeconomic status would differ from crime to crime and I was very happy of the fact that the author didn’t just focus their study on one particular crime. Instead the branched out to a dozen completely different crimes and by doing so they were able to get a wider variety of results to show the readers that it depends from crime to crime. I also really liked the fact that in the discussion portion of the article they added in that on top of using the twelve different crimes they also added four different regression models made up of age, gender, county urbanization ,and prior criminal record. I think these are four important factors to contribute because of how big of a role they can play as well and I was very happy that the authors thought to