About Crime and Punishment

The Crime and Punishment program is a multimedia simulation of the criminal court sentencing process for use in college courses on criminal justice, criminology, judicial politics or process, law, and related courses. In it, students interactively assume the role of the judge charged with the task of imposing sentences on convicted felons in six separate cases. Students are provided with the same array of visual (including full-motion video), audio, and textual materials available to judges in actual criminal sentencing situations. Students then must proceed to render their decisions (sentences).

The purpose of the simulation is to enable instructors to investigate with their classes, using an experimental design, the potential influences of non-legal case characteristics, such as the race, gender, appearance, and demeanor of the defendant, on the severity of sentences imposed. Our intention is to produce a simulated forum in which students are asked to confront the often-difficult decisions concerning appropriate sentences for criminal defendants. The purpose is not to perfectly re-create the exact sentencing process used by judges around the country.

The simulation allows instructors to manipulate these non-legal case characteristics in systematic ways so that some users might see a white defendant, and others an African American defendant, etc., while all other case characteristics are held constant. The program saves the sentencing decisions rendered by students, and performs basic analysis to examine whether a particular class exhibited any bias with respect to the varied case characteristics. Did the class demonstrate a bias with respect to defendant race? With respect to gender? With respect to appearance? These are among the questions that Crime and Punishment was designed to address. By providing the instructor with answers to these questions, the instructor can engage students in discussions of biases in criminal justice at a level not attainable before. Development was supported by a grant from the Fund for Improvement in Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) in the U.S. Department of Education.