Looking at Penalty Scales: How Judicial Actors and the General Public Judge Penal Severity

Abstract

This article focuses on penal severity judgements made by judicial actors (118 defence attorneys, 48 crown prosecutors, 36 probation officers, and 33 judges; N = 135) and the general public (N = 297), who were asked to estimate the severity of a range of penalties using the magnitude-scale technique, developed by Stevens (1975). A group-based approach developed by Nagin (2005) was applied to discover the diversity in penalty scales. Results reveal that while there is reasonable consensus about penal severity for prison sentences, neither members of the public nor judicial actors agree on the underlying metric of severity scales for custodial sentences. Penal equivalencies derived from each penalty scale are used to determine their relative quality. Results show that judicial actors are no better than inexperienced citizens at producing penal severity judgements that seem reasonable and feasible.