The Relationship Between Offender Characteristics of Burglary and Sentence

Abstract

The previous chapter concerned the development and description of offender characteristics bearing on culpability in cases of burglary. To classify a particular burglary in terms in this scheme, it was necessary to identify the categories whose defining content most closely matched the facts about the offender. (It should be remembered that some of the offender characteristics are not dimensional and, accordingly, for these characteristics none, one, or more than one of the constituent categories may apply to a particular case.) At this point the cases were described in terms of a series of codes — the number of relevant categories varied across cases — each code being a score quantifying the level of exculpation associated with its category (except for breach of trust and prior convictions; these characteristics aggravate culpability). This chapter explains how these scores were combined to derive a single score quantifying mitigation for the 100 principal offenders and then examines the relationship between these scores and sentence. This analysis first concerns the scoring and weighting of prior convictions, after which the other offender characteristics are incorporated in the analysis.