NCJ Number
163164
Journal
Criminology Volume: 34 Issue: 2 Dated: (May 1996) Pages: 257-267
Date Published
1996
Length
11 pages
Annotation
An analysis of the impact of the Minnesota sentencing guidelines on the jail incarceration rate (JIR) concludes that the analysis of D'Alessio and Stolzenberg did not address certain methodological problems, that their finding that the sentencing guidelines caused the JIR to increase is spurious, and that the guidelines had little or no impact on the JIR.
Abstract
D'Alessio and Stolzenberg applied an autoregressive integrated moving average analysis to estimate the impact of the guidelines, which went into effect in 1980, on the number of convicted felons sentenced to jail. Their JIR time series consists of data from July 1977 through December 1992, except for the 22 months before and 4 months after the effective date. However, excluding data at a crucial point in the series creates serious regression analysis problems. D'Alessio and Stolzenberg failed to address these problems. Researchers cannot just ignore the missing data or score observations surrounding an innovation as missing data. Different procedures must be used, depending on whether the series is trend stationary or difference stationary. D'Alessio and Stolzenberg did not follow these procedures and thus produced a spurious finding. Tables and 11 references