The Avoidance of Punishment: A Legal-Bureaucratic Model of Suspended Sentences in Federal White-Collar Cases Prior to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines

This research proposes a legal-bureaucratic framework of sentencing in white-collar crime cases. This framework offers a model of sentencing that goes beyond the legal/extralegal debate by specifying how an interplay between legality and bureaucratic interests intervene in the relationship between defendant characteristics, case complexity, and sentence outcomes. In decisions to suspend punishment in federal district courts prior to the federal sentencing guidelines, findings from the structural model indicate the direct and indirect effects of pleading guilty and case complexity on the decision to suspend an incarceration sentence. In addition, the findings offer modest support for the hypothesis that defendant's location in the stratification system translates into advantage at sentencing via a structural link with case complexity and pleading guilty—the nexus of the legal-bureaucratic model.