Models of the jury selection process in a Federal District Court are developed from court records, legal standards, and other information and then compared to determine sources of bias. The jury selection plan developed by the court has been operationally reformulated using 1970 census data to identify bias resulting from even a fair application of the plan. This normative model is also used to test for biases in the procedures and the results of the 1970 plan implementation in Eastern Massachusetts based on voter registration lists. Findings support the hypothesis that the juror selection process effectively discriminates against the poor, the young, racial minorities, women, and persons with low and high educational attainment. Sources of bias are found in the use of outdated voter registration lists, unreturned jury qualification questionnaires, and the excuse process. Recommendations are given for ways to reduce the extent of this bias.

Prior to January 1974, jury selection procedures violating basic standards of randomness had resulted in juries in Erie County, New York, which were overwhelmingly male. This paper describes the biased selection procedures, their discovery by volunteers engaged in a project to ensure a fair trial for prison inmates under indictment for events occurring in the Attica uprising, and the consequences of both improved procedures and an amended law for sexual equality in jury selection.

Two linkages between law and society are explored. First, the existence of a “woman's exemption” had led the jury commissioner and staff to make systematic prejudgments about women's behavior which then resulted in their underrepresentation on juries. Second, lawyers and social scientists worked together, using procedures and concepts from both disciplines to achieve a goal of mutual interest: improvement of the methods of jury selection, so that jury composition would more closely resemble the composition of the community. Possibilities and problems of social scientists working with lawyers are described briefly.

The experiences of 798 burglary and larceny defendants in the criminal courts of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in 1971 were studied to identify the factors having the greatest influence on the defendant's likelihood of emerging from court with an active prison sentence. The following variables were found to have a significant effect, listed in order of importance: (1) severity of offense (defined in terms of value of property taken and degree of skill required)—positive effect; (2) defendant's income—negative effect; (3) prior arrest record—positive effect; (4) strength of case against defendant as determined by promptness of arrest—positive effect. The influence of the defendant's sex could not be measured because there were too few females in the sample. Race, age, and employment were found to be of little or no importance. The four most important variables had a generally additive effect on prison probability.

Further analysis showed that the defendant's income affected not whether he was convicted of an offense, but the likelihood of going to prison after conviction. Most of this effect could be explained by the low-income defendant's poorer opportunity for pretrial release and greater likelihood of having a court-appointed rather than privately retained attorney. This suggests that the apparent disadvantage of the low-income defendant could be overcome by improvement of pretrial release and defense service.

The study's implications with regard to sentencing procedures are discussed. Judges' wide latitude in imposing sentence may enable the defendant's income to exert the large influence that it apparently does, but narrowing judicial discretion may not reduce the effect of income if present plea bargaining practices continue.

Research concerning racial discrimination within the criminal justice system has focused largely upon the police and the courts. There is reason to believe, however, that differential treatment may be more common in less visible proceedings. This research addresses that possibility through an examination of the cases of 243 prisoners who appeared before a parole board from October 1, 1970, through September 30, 1971. There is no evidence of direct racial discrimination. There is evidence, however, that the board differentiated between black and white prisoners in selecting and weighting information when deciding parole. Compared to white prisoners, black prisoners had an additional criterion to meet in order to be paroled—participation in institutional treatment programs. The imposition of this additional criterion indirectly resulted in racial inequities. Black parolees who were treatment participants served a significantly longer portion of their sentence than did white treatment participants. The few black prisoners who were paroled without participating in treatment served a shorter proportion of their sentence than other prisoners. These few black prisoners were older, more likely to be property offenders and had slightly more prior convictions than black treatment participants. These findings are interpreted as indicating a bias against racial militancy.

This study examines the factors that determine the probability that a very common form of deviant behavior, shoplifting, will be detected, reported, and sanctioned. Data obtained both from self-reported crime, and from experiments in which researchers actually shoplifted goods from supermarkets and department stores with the authorization of their executive officers but without the knowledge of store employees, indicate that enforcement of the norm is highly selective. Less than 10 percent of all shoplifting is detected, and customers appear unwilling to report even flagrant cases. Even with an announced policy of full reporting and prosecution, only 70 percent of the shoplifting detected is reported, and only 55 percent is sanctioned. Foreigners, adults, and blue-collar workers are disproportionately represented among those sanctioned.

These findings challenge the common assumption that norms backed by legal sanctions are highly effective. One reason may be that the division of labor between stores, which detect, and police and prosecutor, who sanction, completes the differentiation of moral and legal norms, subverting the effectiveness of both. The results also highlight the misleading nature of criminal statistics, which purport to measure crime but in fact describe the behavior of detecting and enforcing agencies.

This paper analyzes the role of local political leaders in channeling the impact of national development programs on the processes of dispute handling in Zinacantan, a Maya Indian community in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. Although the development programs have caused individual Zinacantecos to become more aware of the benefits they might obtain by appealing to remedy agents outside of the Indian community, few cases are taken to Mexican authorities because Indian leaders, who have a vested interest in handling the disputes of constituents, have sought to preserve the popularity of traditional conciliatory procedures by altering the types of settlements they suggest to disputants. As a result, traditional conciliatory procedures are flourishing, but the substance of the settlements reached through such procedures has begun to change toward conformity with codified state and national laws where those laws conflict with traditional Indian custom.