In the early and mid-1920's Soviet courts were overwhelmed with new criminal business, prompting Bolshevik leaders to transfer most cases of petty crime away from the courts either to administrative proceedings or to lay bodies (comrades' courts and village social courts). This article examines the Bolshevik experiment in decriminalization and diversion—its causes, its politics, and its consequences both for the courts and for the alternatives to them. The crisis of congestion in early Soviet courts resulted neither from a growth in actual criminal behavior nor from prosecution of new crimes devised by the Bolsheviks. It owed its origin to the elimination after the Revolution of various extrajudicial mechanisms used by the Tsars for handling infractions, thereby producing a criminalization of traditional misdeeds. The subsequent adoption by Soviet leaders of a policy of decriminalization followed careful study, and despite the turbulent times bore the mark of rational decision making. And the policy was implemented; a large number of cases were shifted first to administrative processing by police officials and then to lay tribunals, especially to the village social courts, which proved more viable than the comrades' courts which were established in factories. But the waves of diversion did not relieve court congestion, as in each instance new sorts of cases replaced those moved away. The experience tended to confirm the thesis that the amount of crime prosecuted in a society is a function of the capacity of its criminal justice institutions.

Do defendants who plead guilty receive lighter sentences than those with similar charges and attributes who exercise their right to trial? The assertion that they do has long been at the heart of the literature describing and explaining the plea-bargaining process, though it has been questioned in some important work published recently. The existence of sentence differentials is particularly hard to document statistically, because a successfully operating policy of punishing those who go to trial will in fact minimize the number of cases in which the sanction for trial has to be imposed. Examination of data from three California counties, as well as consideration of various theoretical concerns, leads us to argue that sentence differentials are likely to characterize jurisdictions whose disposition patterns are based on inducing most defendants to plead guilty.

Although the possible effect of race on sentencing decisions is a much-studied question, even recent studies suffer from methodological problems. This paper attempts to correct these problems by using a large number of cases and a large number of offenses, by dividing the sentencing decision into two separate decisions, by using an appropriate scale to measure sentence severity, by including controls for relevant legal and extra-legal factors, and by using multivariate analysis. Our major findings are that race does not have a direct effect on sentence severity, but that blacks are more likely than whites to be incarcerated.

Formal conflict resolution is not the principal function of the Philippine Court of Agrarian Relations. Rather, litigants mobilize the court's resources to increase their power over opponents and to maximize gains. A combination of the rights stipulated for the litigants, the aims of the principal and adjunct actors, and the relative power and wealth of the disputants and their allies determines who gets what and how in this struggle. Because the agrarian court exists in a social context where law as norm and the general distribution of power operate to the advantage of the “have” sector, it is limited in its capacity to effectuate social change.

This paper explores the determinants of the costs of prisons. An economic model relates cost to output, input prices, and a number of variables controlling for differences in the type of outputs and inputs for each prison. Data from the federal prison system are used to estimate the model. Our results indicate that a minimum-cost prison would be quite large (1,000 to 1,600 inmates) and that the improvement of some correctional standards (e.g., single-bed cells, more living space) may serve to decrease rather than increase prison operating costs.

This article describes and illustrates a new, easily applied method of scaling the severity of different types of criminal sentences and the seriousness of different types of crimes. In contrast to past approaches, this method is based on actual judicial performance, not on opinions or subjective scaling procedures. Using this approach, the effects on sentencing of variables other than type of crime can be examined.

At the very least, Wilson and Boland and we agree on the complexity of the relationship between governmental actions and social effects. Thus we believe as they do that it is not an easy task to disentangle the effects of policing on crime. We do differ on analytic strategy. We believe that time-series analyses tell us more than cross-sectional analyses do about causal patterns.