Unwarranted disparity taking place at the stage of prosecution has long been an interest for sentencing researchers. Research exploring the effect of offender race on prosecutorial decisions, however, has produced conflicting and inconclusive results. Some studies concluded that minority offenders faced more unfavorable outcomes than White offenders, whereas others found no significant impact of race/ethnicity in the prosecution process. Still others found a minority advantage. Given these inconsistencies, this research uses meta-analytic methodology to assess empirical findings from a body of scholarship that examined the relationship between race/ethnicity and prosecutorial outcomes. Analyses of homogeneity and moderator variables are also conducted to explore whether there are factors accounting for variability in effect sizes across studies. The result suggests that minority offenders face greater odds of being charged or fully prosecuted than White offenders. Moreover, several moderators, primarily methodologically relevant, account for variability across effect sizes.

Research examining disparities in sentencing outcomes under federal sentencing guidelines has focused almost exclusively on aggregate national data. Although these studies contribute considerably to the criminological literature on sentencing disparity, their findings may have masked contextual variation in relation to case processing across jurisdictions. With data from the U.S. District Courts for Minnesota, Nebraska, and Southern Iowa for 1998 through 2000, this article assesses whether interdistrict variations in sentence outcomes exist and whether the factors that affect these outcomes vary across jurisdictions. It also attempts to determine whether disparities in sentence outcomes can be attributed to downward departures. The findings raise questions about the validity of the assumption of uniformity in the federal sentencing process and the use of aggregate data to study federal sentence outcomes.

Research exploring the effects of an offender’s age on unwarranted sentencing disparity has produced conflicting and inconclusive results. Some studies concluded that age was inversely correlated with sentencing severity, whereas others found a positive association. Still others found no significant impact of age on sentencing differentials or that age had a curvilinear effect. Given these inconsistencies, the present research uses meta-analytic methodology to assess empirical findings from a body of sentencing studies. In particular, this research focuses on the imposition of sentence length. Findings from this meta-analysis reveal that the age of the offender has no effect on the length of the prison term and that the strength of the association between the two variables is extremely weak. The homogeneity analysis indicates that variability in effect sizes across contrasts is not due simply to sampling error. A number of moderators related to sample and analytic characteristics account for the differences in effect sizes.

Research has recently shown a renewed interest in the effect of citizenship status on sentencing outcomes. This line of investigation, however, is limited to the individual-level analysis. In addition, research on the threat hypothesis has overwhelmingly focused on racial and ethnic threat. This study extends prior research by testing the social/group threat hypothesis in terms of citizenship and examines two primary variables of interest—the size of the noncitizen population and offender citizenship status. This study seeks to find how the size of the noncitizen population as a macro-level factor and offender citizenship status as a micro-level factor independently and jointly affect federal sentencing. The independent effects of other macro-level factors in the context of courts and areas on sentencing decisions, as well as their interactions with offender citizenship status, are also examined. With all offenses considered together, the cross-level finding provides support for social threat posed by noncitizen offenders, revealing that judges in districts with a large noncitizen population impose longer sentences on noncitizen offenders than those in districts with a small noncitizen population.