Cumulative Disadvantage: Examining Racial and Ethnic Disparity in Prosecution and Sentencing (original) (raw)
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Race and Cumulative Discrimination in the Prosecution of Criminal Defendants
Race and Justice, 2013
Most research investigates the effect of a defendant's race on severity of imposed legal sanction at only one of several decision points that comprise the criminal justice system. This myopic focus on what can be termed episodic discrimination is problematic because racial discrimination evinced at one decision point may be amplified, negated, or even reversed at other decision points. Here we synthesize estimates of a defendant's race on the severity of imposed legal sanction at each of the decision points encountered by a defendant as he or she progresses through the criminal justice system. Although initial results show that the effect of race on severity of outcome depends on the specific decision point analyzed, a synthesis of these race estimates in a meta-analysis reveals that the odds of receiving a severe sanction is approximately 42% higher for a Black defendant even after controlling for prior record and other legal and extralegal variables. Thus, although the influence of a defendant's race on the severity of sanction is statistically discernible at just two of the eight criminal justice decision points, a substantive cumulative racial discriminatory effect is evident when all the individual decision points are considered in their totality.
Article Race and Cumulative Discrimination in the Prosecution of Criminal Defendants
2016
Most research investigates the effect of a defendant’s race on severity of imposed legal sanction at only one of several decision points that comprise the criminal justice system. This myopic focus on what can be termed episodic discrimination is pro-blematic because racial discrimination evinced at one decision point may be amplified, negated, or even reversed at other decision points. Here we synthesize estimates of a defendant’s race on the severity of imposed legal sanction at each of the decision points encountered by a defendant as he or she progresses through the criminal justice system. Although initial results show that the effect of race on severity of outcome depends on the specific decision point analyzed, a synthesis of these race estimates in a meta-analysis reveals that the odds of receiving a severe sanction is approximately 42 % higher for a Black defendant even after controlling for prior record and other legal and extralegal variables. Thus, although the influence...
And Justice for Some: Race, Crime, and Punishment in the US Criminal Justice System
Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2010
How has the criminal justice system~CJS! responded to racial diversity in the United States? Criminologists and sociologists have led the way in studying the reality of how Blacks are treated relative to Whites by law enforcement and the courts. There is now an extensive literature documenting the far greater likelihood of Blacks being arrested, sentenced and incarcerated compared to Whites, and a fairly contentious literature attempting to sort out the degree to which these racial disparities in outcomes are traceable to racial discrimination in the justice system. Far less attention, however, has been paid to studying perceptions of the fairness of the justice system in the eyes of Blacks and Whites, as well as the political consequences of these perceptions. We maintain that the huge race gap in these fairness perceptions, which is the focus of this paper, is critically important for a variety of reasons. As we will argue below, most Whites fail to see discrimination in the justice system and consequently believe the system is, for the most part, colour-blind and fair. Because they attribute racial disparities in justice outcomes to the greater criminality of Blacks, they are highly supportive of a slew of punitive policies as the best way to deal with crime. Most African Americans, on the other hand, see discrimination in virtu
The Cumulative Effects of Racial Disparities in Criminal Processing
Journal Inistitute of Justice and Internation Studies, 2007
Data from the State Court Processing Statistics Series was used to analyze the cumulative effects of racial and ethnic disparities in criminal processing of men who are charged with felony drug offenses in large urban counties from 1990 to 2002. Estimating a series of models, I find not only that Black and Latino men receive less beneficial sentencing decisions than White men with similar legal characteristics, but also that these disparities are produced through a combination of direct and indirect effects. More particularly, I find that Black and Latino men are less likely to be granted non-financial release, more likely to be denied bail, and are given higher bails than White men with similar legal characteristics; that Black and Latino men are more likely to be adjudicated as felons than White men with similar legal characteristics; and that sentencing outcomes are determined by a combination of current case characteristics, prior record, economic resources and networks, and racially disparate processing—both indirectly through pretrial incarceration and level of adjudication and directly during sentencing decisions.
Ethnic Disparities in Sentencing: Warranted or Unwarranted?
Large research efforts have been directed at the exploration of ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system, documenting harsher treatment of minority ethnic defendants, across offence types, criminal justice decisions, and jurisdictions. However, most studies on the topic have relied on observational data, which can only approximate ‘like with like’ comparisons. As a result, researchers, practitioners and policy-makers have often been wary of interpreting such disparities as evidence of discrimination. We use causal diagrams to lay out explicitly the different ways estimates of ethnic discrimination derived from observational data could be biased. Beyond the commonly acknowledged problem of unobserved case characteristics, we also discuss other less well-known, yet likely more consequential problems: measurement error in the form of racially-determined case characteristics or as a result of high heterogeneity within the ‘Whites’ reference group, and selection bias from non-re...
Race-based inequity in federal criminal sentencing is widely acknowledged, and yet our understanding of its causes is far from complete. While researchers have regularly interrogated federal sentencing data for evidence of racially differential treatment by court actors, sentencing inequity owes both to this direct bias and to system-wide structural factors that produce disparate impacts. We present an approach to disentangling these mechanisms of inequity and we use it to provide, for the first time, estimates of these disparities within individual federal judicial districts. We study over one-half million sentencing records from the United States Sentencing Commission database, spanning the years 2006 to 2020. Black and Hispanic defendants receive average sentences that are approximately 19 months longer and 5 months longer, respectively. Demographics factors and sentencing guideline elements account for nearly 17 of the 19 months for Black defendants and all five of the months fo...
Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 1989
Our purpose is to bridge the criminal justice and stratification research literatures and to pursue the argument that homologous structural principles stratify alloca tion processes across central institutions of American society. The principle observed here in the making of bail decisions, as in earlier studies of the allocation of earnings, is that stratification resources operate to the greater advantage of whites than blacks. The operation of this principle is established through the estimation of covariance structure models of pretrial release decisions affecting 5660 defendants in 10 federal courts. Education and income are treated in this study as observed components of a composite construct, stratification resources, which works to the greater advantage of whites. Prior record is also found to operate to the greater advantage of whites. Two further variables, dangerousness and community ties, increase bail severity among blacks and whites. While the effect of community ties has been legally legitimized since the Bail Reform Act of 1966, the effect of dangerousness was not so legitimized until the Bail Reform Act of 1984. However, because our data precede the latter act, they confirm that this act simply reinstitutionalized earlier practice. Meanwhile, our race-specific findings may explain why although this and earlier studies find negligible main effects of race on criminal justice outcomes, black Americans nonetheless per ceive more criminal injustice than do whites. In the criminal justice system, as in other spheres of American society, whites receive a better return on their resources, but our findings that the statutory severity of the offense and dangerousness work to the relative disadvantage of white defendants challenges conflict and labeling theory's one-dimensional characterization of black defen dant disadvantage.