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Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-cjb-10.1177_00938548231165278 for Effective Probation Strategies to Respond to Signals of Poor Progress on Community Supervision by Alex J. Breno, AviNASH Bhati, Tonya VanDeinse, Amy Murphy, Gary S. Cuddeback and Faye S. Taxman in Criminal Justice and Behavior

Judicial discretion has rightly been termed a puzzle. Given the several competing concerns that can influence judges when they sanction offenders and the institutional structures that typically constrain their decisions, the task of uncovering the motivational structures underlying judicial discretion has proven very challenging for scholars. This paper develops a behavioral model of federal judges exercising discretion pursuant to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines and derives testable implications regarding the amount of prison term they impose on convicted offenders. An information theoretic approach is used to investigate these assertions. The data reveal a host of information about judicial discretion including how various factors affect sanctioning decisions, how variation in case and offender attributes heighten or reduce judicial concerns, how judges juggle various competing concerns while exercising discretion, and how compliance with the guidelines competes with other judicial concerns.

If recidivism is defined as rearrest within a finite period following release from prison, then the kinds of outcomes typically available to researchers include: (i) whether or not the individual was rearrested within the follow-up period; (ii) how many times the individual was rearrested; and (iii) what was the duration from release to first (or subsequent) rearrest. Since these outcomes are all different manifestations of the same underlying stochastic process, they provide multiple analogies from which to recover information about it. This paper develops a semi-parametric approach for utilizing information in these, and several other related outcomes, to predict criminal recidivism and presents preliminary findings.