Racial Disparities in Lifer Parole Outcomes: The Hidden Role of Professional Evaluations (original) (raw)

Law & Social Inquiry

Abstract

One in seven people in prison in the US is serving a life sentence, and most of these people will eventually be eligible for discretionary parole release. Yet parole hearings are notoriously understudied. With only a handful of exceptions, few researchers have considered the ways in which race shapes decision-makers’ perception of parole candidates. We use a data set created from over seven hundred California lifer parole hearing transcripts to examine the factors that predict parole commissioners’ decisions. We find significant racial disparities in outcomes, with Black parole candidates less likely to receive parole grants than white parole candidates, and test two possible indirect mechanisms. First, we find that racial disparity is unassociated with differences in rehabilitative efforts of Black versus white parole candidates, suggesting that differential levels of self-rehabilitation are not responsible for the disparity. Second, we test the hypothesis that racial disparity owe...

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