UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Emerson Waite found his passion for criminal justice reform witnessing firsthand a woman rediscover purpose through a four-phase treatment and recovery program after being convicted of driving under the influence (DUI).
Waite — who recently earned a doctorate in criminology from Penn State — was an intern with the Snyder County District Attorney’s Office at the time. The DUI program was offered by Snyder County’s court as an alternative punishment to incarceration.
He met the woman on the first day of his internship, when she was advancing from the first phase of the program to the second. On the day she completed her final phase, Waite was able to hear just how much the program impacted her.
“She said when she began the program, she was going through it only to avoid jail time,” he said. “By the time she was graduating, she grew an immense appreciation for all she gained from it, volunteering and eventually becoming employed. It changed her life.”
This experience drove Waite’s curiosity about typical incarceration and sentencing practices, he said, and fueled his research topic at Penn State.
Researching state-wide sentencing practices at Penn State
At Penn State, Waite decided his research would home in on a topic not frequently studied — how sentences, a punishment for a crime that an alleged offender was convicted of or pleaded guilty to, in Pennsylvania historically have been determined.
For his dissertation, he assessed data from the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, a legislative agency housed at Penn State to advance more effective and uniform sentencing decisions across the state. Later, Waite served as a graduate research assistant for the agency.
Waite focused on alleged offenders eligible for a jail or prison sentence, where prior research considered only a broader scope of punishments like probation or other alternatives to incarceration. A narrower approach allowed him to look specifically at the decision point in sentencing across various cases.
He discovered significant county variations across Pennsylvania in jail and prison sentences.
“Because prisons are operated by the state and jails are run at a county level, there can be differences in sentences based on the county you’re sentenced in,” he said. “Two individuals with the exact same criminal backgrounds could commit the exact same crime in two different parts of the state and receive different sentences solely based on their locations.”
Sometimes, Waite found, county variations in sentencing are extreme enough that one convicted offender could go to jail and the other to prison for the same offense. Waite noted that this is consequential, because jail is a lesser punishment of two or fewer years in Pennsylvania, whereas prison is designed for more severe offenses and longer sentences.
He found that factors like population demographics, socioeconomic indicators and political trends did not significantly affect state-wide sentencing practices. Instead, his research suggests that the ways members of county-level courts — such as a local judge, prosecutor and defense attorney — engage and become acquainted with each other over time is the major driver of the variations. Waite referred to this concept as “court communities.”
“People of a court community become familiar with types of cases they process over time, which can influence sentencing policies,” he said. “I believe it’s less about what we may perceive as key factors that could impact sentencing and more about people in a court working together and establishing norms over a period of time that may vary, sometimes greatly, from neighboring counties’ norms.”
Waite detailed his work in his dissertation, which was assessed by a panel of faculty. However, he noted, his research would need further exploration and deeper review to verify his hypothesis.
During his four years as a graduate research assistant with the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, Waite was able to dig deeper into topics like veteran involvement in the criminal justice system. He also researched differences in recidivism — recommitting a criminal offense after serving a sentence — following jail versus prison incarceration.
He cited the experience as a great supplement to his research and said it was where he gained the most valuable career skills at Penn State.
“I’ve never been interested in pursuing a career in academia or academic research, but I was always interested in policy reform,” Waite said. “So, the opportunity to work in an advocacy reform setting and gain tangible industry experience definitely gave me a leg up in the job market.”
As one of his largest and most impactful projects there, Waite performed an initial review of the significant changes in sentencing guidelines set forth in the eighth edition of Pennsylvania Sentencing Guidelines, which were outlined by the Commission on Sentencing. He determined how sentences for identical crimes from the seventh edition guidelines compared to those from the eighth edition, allowing the Commission on Sentencing to measure the impact of their decade-long review and adoption process.
The eighth edition of the guidelines took effect in Pennsylvania on Jan. 1, 2024, applying to all offenses committed on or after that date.