Exploring sentencing disparities in the Nordic context: A multilevel analysis of court- and judge-level variation in sentences of ‘aggravated driving under the influence’ in Finnish district courts

Abstract

Sentencing studies have stressed the importance of looking beyond between-court sentencing disparities by also observing within-court sources of variation. In the current study, we examine court- and judge-level variation in aggravated driving under the influence sentences (N = 10,481) in Finnish district courts using a three-level regression approach. Results indicate that 6.4% of the variance in the decision to incarcerate are explained by the differences between judges and 4.3% by the differences between courts. Consequently, our results suggest that sentencing disparities cannot be attributed solely to differences between courts but also to the individual judges within those courts. In addition, certain extra-legal factors on all three levels are associated with the outcome, namely the mode of conviction, position of the judge, court’s driving under the influence caseload, crime rate of the court jurisdiction and the urbanization of the court jurisdiction. Implications of the findings for both future research and policies are discussed.