Mismatch of Guidelines and Offender Danger and Blameworthiness Departures as Policy Signals from the Courts

• Published date: 01 May 2014
• Date: 01 May 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12083
• Author: Jeffery T. Ulmer

POLICY ESSAY

DOWNWARD DEPARTURES IN CHILD

PORNOGRAPHY SENTENCING

Mismatch of Guidelines and Offender

Danger and Blameworthiness Departures

as Policy Signals from the Courts

Jeery T.Ulmer

The Pennsylvania State University

Kaiser and Spohn (2014, this issue) are to be commended for producing such

a high-quality and important piece of research on the mismatch between U.S.

Sentencing Guidelines’ (hereafter Guidelines) sentencing recommendations for

nonproduction child pornography offenses (hereafter NP-CP) and actual sentencing pref-

erences in U.S. district courts. Kaiser and Spohn discuss how a “moral panic” about “sex

offenders,” a highly heterogeneous category (Sample and Bray, 2003), resulted in new

sex offender laws, sex offender registration and community notification, and tougher

sentencing throughout the 1990s and 2000s. New laws, tougher sentencing standards,

and greater federal law enforcement priority for child pornography (hereafter CP) of-

fenses were part of this trend. Federal law enforcement agencies employ increasingly

sophisticated cyber methods to track CP posted and distributed on file-sharing sites

back to the IP addresses of the sources, and arrest them. In fact, the investigation,

tracking, and prosecution of CP offenses has been a steadily growing emphasis of the

U.S. Department of Justice (see justice.gov/criminal/ceos/subjectareas/childporn.html).

The Department of Justice also has testified to its views of the seriousness of

the child pornography problem (see justice.gov/criminal/ceos/CT/downloads/Testimony-

Sentencing-Commission-Fottrell.pdf). In connection with these growing efforts, the num-

ber of CP cases sentenced in federal courts has grown steadily, as shown in Figure 1. The

number of CP cases sentenced increased from 780 in 2004 to 1,626 in 2008, and then to

2,014 in 2012.

Kaiser and Spohn’s (2014) findings square with a small but increasingly visible

backlash growing against the width and breadth of the carceral net cast for that extremely

Direct correspondence to Jeffery T. Ulmer, Department of Sociology and Criminology, 211 Oswald Tower, The

Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 (e-mail: Jtu100@psu.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12083 C2014 American Society of Criminology 271

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 13 rIssue 2