“Focal concerns” is the predominant theoretical framework in criminology for explaining disparities in sentencing outcomes. While the framework has generated a large body of empirical scholarship, its postulates remain inadequately tested in the criminological literature. In this paper, I offer a conceptual and methodological critique of focal concerns as it is being deployed in a large body of sentencing research. I first trace the genealogy of the “focal concerns” concept and detail its current articulation. I then describe the body of work that has reduced “focal concerns” to a commonsense psychological construct, and illustrate the fallacies of logic and paucity of direct theory development and testing that weaken the explanatory value of the framework. I conclude by building on Ulmer’s recent call to treat criminal courts as “inhabited institutions” to assess approaches that are more social scientifically robust and empirically testable for understanding how sentencing disparity is produced.
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Mona Lynch (2019) studied this question.