Toward an Empirical Foundation for Federal Sentencing Practice: An Evaluation of Corporate Sentencing Data.

During a recent study of how 1991 federal sentencing guidelines have affected the penalities that federal courts impose on public coporations, we performed an independent evaluation of the quality of the data on corporate sanctions released by the U.S. Sentencing Commission to the public (as required by statute) through ICPSR. Our initial findings led us to use other, indenpendantly-compiled data for our own research. Yet others have drawn implications about the effectiveness of the federal sentencing guidelines using ICPSR data and are likely to do so in the future. This paper presents the main findings of our evaluation, which focused on the quality of the 1988-1996 ICPSR data on public corporations.