Initially, sentencing was meant to refer only to the actions of the judge at the sentencing hearing, but the field has come to understand that all actions by actors in the criminal justice system have a role to play in final punishment outcomes. From this perspective, sentencing research can be thought to incoroporate all "sentencing" decisions, including charging, plea bargains, and even parole release decisions. The predominant mode of research in the field in recent years has been the sophisticated statistical analysis of conviction data. Despite the impressive success of this main paradigm of sentencing research, there is a growing sense among scholars in criminology that this particular approach has stalled. This symposium is intended to help identify new avenues for work in this area, in part by actively connecting the range of scholars engaging in sentencing research. A further intention is to more explicitly connect empirical researchers in this field to the policymakers in this area (e.g., sentencing commissions, judges, legislators) and to integrate junior scholars and scholars from underrepresented groups into the broader community of sentencing scholars.
