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Dangerousness or Diminished Capacity? Exploring the Association of Gender and Mental Illness with Violent Offense Sentence Length

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Abstract

The presence of mental illness within criminal sentencing can be conceptualized both as a mitigating factor based on the diminished capacity argument and as an aggravating factor stemming from the perceived dangerousness stigma associated with mental illness. The current study tests these hypotheses for violent offenses using data from the 2004 Survey of Inmates in State Correctional Facilities within a weighted negative binomial regression framework. Separate analyses were conducted for male and female offenders to isolate gender effects in relation to the sentence length of offenders with a mental illness. The findings reveal that the presence of a mental illness tended to increase violent conviction sentence length reported by male offenders and decrease sentence length reported by female offenders, suggesting mental illness in the context of a violent conviction may be interpreted as evidence of diminished capacity for females and future dangerousness for males.

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Notes

  1. After testing the relationship between each individual mental health diagnosis and sentence length, it was determined that collapsing this variable into “any mental illness” presented the most appropriate and least convoluted analytical strategy.

  2. Year of admission was also examined as a variable to control for changes in sentencing laws but the majority of admissions, greater than 95 %, occurred from 1990 onward with the exceptions of manslaughter and sexual assault where 90 % of admissions occurred from 1990 onward and murder where 90 % of admissions occurred from 1980 onward. Regardless of offense, year of admission was not associated with sentence length or as a mediator/moderator with any other variable in this study. We speculate that many of the truth-in-sentencing laws that were created during the study’s time frame did not increase the amount of sentence rather they increased the amount of the sentence served.

  3. Some may consider sentence length to be a continuous variable because it represents a set period of time an offender is supposed to serve. However, the assumption of a continuous variable ignores the very real fact of how offenders are sentenced (e.g. sentences are assigned in discrete units of days, months, and years) and that there were very few offenders in this sample, less than 1 %, whose sentence did not resolve to an integer when length was expressed in months. Hence, the assumption of a count random variable is well-founded.

  4. While one might expect jurisdiction to matter in explaining variation in sentence length because these jurisdictions do vary by political leanings, this expectation did not hold in these analyses. Walker’s (2011) concept of the “going rate,” where punishment is standardized and predictable, suggests why jurisdictions are probably not important in explaining the sentencing variation in this dataset. Moreover, the going rate for any particular offense category in the U.S. is probably very similar. Further exploration of this finding is needed but beyond the scope of this study.

  5. While these rates for any mental illness for females may seem implausibly high given that Wilper, et al., (2009) estimated the rate of any mental illness as 25.5 % using the same data for all state inmates, it is key to remember that females only account for 7 % of the total U.S. state prison population so adjusting the above rates by gender prevalence gives a rate of 25.56 % for the total sample in this study.

  6. While a 33.8 month decrease in a murder sentence for Black offenders, a 66.5 month decrease for Hispanic offenders and a 76.6 month decrease for Other Race/Ethnicity might seem large, these represent less than a 3 year reduction, a 6 year reduction respectively, and a 6.5 year reduction on a base line average of 26 years reported sentence length for murder, so these results are not as dramatic as they first appear to be. Additionally, we are missing pertinent information about the murder conviction, e.g., gang-motivated, stranger vs. acquaintance, etc., that might better explain this finding.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminal Justice, College of Human Ecology, East Carolina University, East Fifth Street, Greenville, NC, 27858-4353, USA

    Megan L. Davidson

  2. Department of Criminal Justice, College of Health & Public Affairs, University of Central Florida, HPA1-323, Orlando, FL, 32816, Florida

    Jeffrey W. Rosky

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  1. Megan L. Davidson
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  2. Jeffrey W. Rosky
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Correspondence to Megan L. Davidson.

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Davidson, M.L., Rosky, J.W. Dangerousness or Diminished Capacity? Exploring the Association of Gender and Mental Illness with Violent Offense Sentence Length. Am J Crim Just 40, 353–376 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-014-9267-1

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