Building on our earlier work testing the stability of punishment hypothesis, we here combine the general modeling strategy previously employed with more behaviorally grounded models of actors' expectations and preferences. Using these tools, we model the historical attempts by criminal justice actors in California to balance prison admissions and releases in an equilibrating manner. We find that there have been efforts to regulate the flow of individuals through prison and that, contrary to expectations, these processes are not very different for males and females.

Cuban popular courts have been a subject of widespread interest among Western scholars. This paper analyzes the factors which led to the development of this judicial experiment as well as the reasons for its demise. The success or failure of this experiment was closely tied to long-term economic and political goals of the Cuban government, which eventually came to require an institutionalized bureaucratic cadre to operate its judicial system. This shift doomed the popular courts and led to the emergence of the legal profession as one of the most influential groups within Cuban society.

Data covering a ten-year period in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, are used to estimate the effect of race and other variables on sentences given to persons charged with armed robbery and burglary. Longitudinal data, coupled with interviews of participants, are used to overcome problems of sample selection bias usually associated with cross-sectional studies of the determinants of sentencing. The research shows that race had a clear effect on both the decision to imprison and the length of prison terms in the earliest period (1967-1968) but not in the two later periods (1971-1972 and 1976-1977). The racial neutrality of sentencing in the later periods appears to be the result of changes in the composition of the judiciary, a greater bureaucratization of the prosecutorial and defense bar, and the rise of decision rules that reduce the effect of judicial ideology on outcomes.

I argued in the paper that has given rise to this exchange (1982) that Wertheimer failed to distinguish between two questions: (A) Are negotiated pleas involuntary in a sense that renders them legally invalid? and (B) Are negotiated pleas entered involuntarily in a sense that justifies the abolition of plea bargaining as a matter of social policy? In his reply, Wertheimer agrees that he failed to make this distinction but disputes its importance. He offers two reasons for minimizing its significance: (1) That to decide (A) judges must decide “questions of social and political morality”; and (2) that the structure of the concept of voluntariness is the same in both (A) and (B). I will argue that (1) is false and that (2) is not true in any interesting sense.