Finnish study examined between-court sentencing variation and its backgrounds in a decision to incarcerate.
In June 2025 I defended my doctoral thesis on sentencing disparities in Finnish district courts. In this blog post, I will shortly describe results from one substudy of my thesis – an article that I presented in the Nsfk’s research seminar 2025 (Malin & Tanskanen, 2024). The main aim of this study was to study the extent and backgrounds of regional, between-court, sentencing disparities.
Studies focusing on regional sentencing disparities have often used ‘courts as communities’ theory to explain this variation. The theoretical framework namely sees courts as communities, which are influenced by their environmental and organizational factors and actors working in them. The theory is developed in the US and mainly tested in the US and other common law countries. However, due to differences between jurisdictions, it is unclear how well the theory fits to Nordic context.
This study used dataset describing sentences for aggravated driving under influence (ADUI) offenders constituting of 10,481 cases. We combined some court-level variables into the dataset to examine the theory. Further, we were able to identify the judges in the data. Following this, the data was analysed using a three-level logistic regression approach taking into account the variation on court- and judge-levels.
Results indicated that 6.4% of the variance in the decision to incarcerate was explained by differences between judges and 4.3% by differences between courts. Thus, the origins of between-court disparities were partly traced to court actors as between-judge variation has a more substantial impact on decisions to incarcerate than between-court variation. Additionally, certain contextual factors at all three levels were associated with the outcome, including the mode of conviction, position of the judge, court’s DUI caseload, crime rate of the court jurisdiction, and urbanization of the court jurisdiction.
The results are important in both national and international contexts. In Finnish context, studies focusing on the role of judges have been requested. Further, internationally only a few previous studies have been able to similarly consider both judge-level and court-level. Researchers have called studies from different legal contexts. The results of the current study are in line with the courts as communities framework. In the future, I hope to see more Nordic research on this theme and for example on the role of other legal actors in sentencing.
About the author:
Tiina Malin (https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/tiina-malin) works at the Institute of Criminology and Legal Policy, University of Helsinki. Her dissertation focused on regional sentencing disparities, which are examined with both quantitative and qualitative methods. The article summarised in this blog post is available here: https://doi.org/10.1177/17488958241270733
