Race, Ethnicity, and Habitual-Offender Sentencing

Abstract

Although sentencing research has expanded over the past decade, very little has been published in the area of habitual-offender statutes. The current research revisits and updates two of the few studies that focused on these sentencing enhancements. Crawford, Chiricos, and Kleck (1998), and later Crawford (2000), examined the application of the habitual-offender sentence enhancement for offenders in Florida in 1992 and 1993. Consistent with the prior research, this study includes individual-level as well as county-level variables and also updates the analysis by examining more recent data, including a measure of ethnicity, and using hierarchical general linear modeling to simultaneously model individual-level data nested within counties. The racial threat perspective serves as the backdrop to explain racial and ethnic disparity in punishment decisions based on contextual as well as individual threat. The findings indicate that racial and ethnic sentence disparity exists when habitual-offender status is invoked in Florida.

Driving racial profiling research forward: Learning lessons from sentencing research

“…Offense type and prior record continued to be the most important determinants of sentencing decisions, but extralegal factors such as race and gender also influenced decisions (Kramer & Ulmer, 1996). The impact of race was also linked to sentencing decisions for drug offenses at the federal level (Albonetti, 1997) and the labeling of habitual offenders (Crawford, Chiricos, & Kleck, 1998;Crow & Johnson, 2008).…”

County-Level Context and Sentence Lengths for Black, Latinx, and White Individuals Sentenced to Prison: A Multi-Level Assessment

“…Although Wang and Mears (2015) and Feldmeyer and colleagues (2015) found support for the racial threat hypothesis in their examination of sentence lengths, they did not observe similar effects for ethnic threat, but Ulmer and Johnson (2004) did. Florida counties with larger shares of Black residents are also more likely to designate Black drug offenders as "habitual," resulting in sentencing enhancements (Crow & Johnson, 2008). Still, other studies did not find support for racial/ethnic threat and sentence length (Chen, 2013;Feldmeyer & Ulmer, 2011).…”

The Interactive Effects of National Origin and Immigration Status on Latino Drug Traffickers in U.S. Federal Courts

“…More recent studies compare Latinos to Whites and Blacks on sentencing outcomes (Brennan & Spohn, 2008; Crow & Johnson, 2008; Demuth & Steffensmeier, 2004; Feldmeyer & Ulmer, 2011; Frenzel & Ball, 2007; Kautt & Spohn, 2002; Light, 2014; Light et al, 2014; Steffensmeier & Demuth, 2000, 2001; Sutton, 2013; Wolfe et al, 2011). Much of it indicates that Latinos fare worse than Whites do, and in some cases, worse than Blacks do (Albonetti, 1997; Demuth & Steffensmeier, 2004; Steffensmeier & Demuth, 2000, 2001).…”