Abstract:
Education is known to be valuable, which in turn can be a critical component to the rehabilitation process. Reasoning behind the apparent disparity in sentencing decisions is extrinsic and complicated, although research has provided multiple avenues of explanation. The empirical literature on education and crime has focused almost exclusively on the effects of educational attainment on post-school criminal activity; however, a few studies have attempted to estimate the ‘effects’ of educational attainment on contemporaneous crime. This study will evaluate the level of education that has been attained by federal inmates and see if inmates with some education background have lesser sentences than inmates with no educational background. In order to get the full scope of the independent variable effect on sentence length this study will use crosstabulation. This study plan on using cross-tabulations to describe the relationship between educational attainment and sentence length, while controlling for serious crimes and maximum sentence length. Variable coding will support the analysis. The results from this study showed educational attainment plays a role in sentencing and criminal offenses. The discussion of the findings is important because it will show that educational attainment plays a role in the criminal sentencing process. This study hopes to find educational attainment a key factor in how people are sentenced. Results from this study showed educational attainment play a role in sentencing but it does not do a good job in helping predict sentence length.