Stereotyping as a force for increasing crime rates.

When should a case be treated as a case of a crime? If a case is to be treated as a case of a crime, how seriously should it be treated? Seriously enough to be treated as a felony rather than as a misdemeanor? Seriously enough to impose a sentence of incarceration rather than of probation or of adjournment in contemplation of dismissal? These are the questions routinely faced by official decision-makers at various levels of criminal justice systems in the United States. Provisions of substantive and procedural criminal law do not fully determine answers to these questions. Inevitably (and increasingly as legal provisions become more detailed and complex), officials are constrained to use extralegal bases for making criminal justice decisions (Pepinsky, 1976a; pp 13-24). A variety of research findings indicates the preeminence of one extralegal strategy of criminal justice decision-making. Decision-makers tend to rely heavily on information provided by other officials as a guide to whether and how seriously to treat a case as a crime. Pepinsky (1976c) has found police patrolmen's decisions as to whether to report offenses to be based largely on what the patrolmen had been told by their dispatcher about the nature of citizen complaints to which they are to respond. If the dispatcher had named an offense in a call to which the patrolmen responded (e.g., check a burglary), they were quite likely to report an offense thereafter. If the dispatcher had failed to name an offense in the call (e.g., check neighbor trouble, or see the party at . . .), the patrolmen were almost certain not to report an offense,