Racial and Sex Disparities in Prison Sentences: The Effect of District‐Level Judicial Demographics

Schanzenbach, Max M.

doi:10.1086/425597

Cited by 120 publications

(78 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…A recent contribution to the literature is from Schanzenbach (2005). This study focuses on understanding the impact of judicial characteristics on case outcomes, using variation in judicial characteristics at the federal district level.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Judges Vary in Their Treatment of Race?

Abrams¹,

Bertrand²,

Mullainathan³

2012

The Journal of Legal Studies

229

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Are minorities treated differently by the legal system? Systematic racial differences in case characteristics, many unobservable, make this a difficult question to answer directly. In this paper, we estimate whether judges differ from each other in how they sentence minorities, avoiding potential bias from unobservable case characteristics by exploiting the random assignment of cases to judges. We measure the between-judge variation in the difference in incarceration rates and sentence lengths between AfricanAmerican and White defendants. We perform a Monte Carlo simulation in order to explicitly construct the appropriate counterfactual, where race does not influence judicial sentencing. In our data set, which includes felony cases from Cook County, Illinois, we find statistically significant between-judge variation in incarceration rates, although not in sentence lengths.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Judges Vary in Their Treatment of Race?

Abrams¹,

Bertrand²,

Mullainathan³

2012

The Journal of Legal Studies

229

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Many scholars have suggested that judges have different sentencing philosophies (e.g., Hofer, Blackwell, and Ruback 1999), which may be affected by the standard of appellate review (Fischman and Schanzenbach 2011), with correlations between sentencing practices and judicial characteristics such as race, gender, and political affiliation (Welch 1988, Schanzenbach 2005, Schanzenbach and Tiller 2007, Schanzenbach and Tiller 2008. However, prior empirical research on inter-judge disparity and the impact of judicial demographics on sentencing practices has been hampered by the lack of judge identifiers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Free at Last? Judicial Discretion and Racial Disparities in Federal Sentencing

Yang¹

2015

The Journal of Legal Studies

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“…Ample literature demonstrates that these disproportionate figures are mere samples of the myriad results of significant institutionalized racism within the US criminal justice system (Alexander 2012). Activities associated with African-Americans are more likely to be criminalized (Davis 2007;Cacho 2012) and, once this is the case, African-Americans are more likely to be strenuously punished for engaging in them (Mustard 2001;Schanzenbach 2005).…”

Section: The Racialization Of Felony Disenfranchisementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Felon Disenfranchisement Laws and the Feedback Loop of Political Exclusion: the Case of Florida

Phillips

Deckard

2015

J Afr Am St

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Violence against Black bodies in Florida is so widespread that the national #BlackLivesMatter movement was born in the state on the night young Trayvon Martin was killed with impunity. This research investigates the socio-political context in which this violence is both legal and apparently accepted, problematizing the citizenship status of members of the Floridian African-American community-over 23 % of whom cannot vote due to stringent state felony disenfranchisement legislation. This research estimates the effects of this widespread electoral exclusion on Floridian elections and, resultantly, on the legislative realities of the state. We find that the form and extent of felony disenfranchisement in Florida have likely put the Right Party in power, worked to create legislation that is counter to the interests of African-Americans, and ultimately achieved a marginalization of the population so deleterious to its citizenship status as to put into question the worth of its members' lives.

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Racial and Sex Disparities in Prison Sentences: The Effect of District‐Level Judicial Demographics

Cited by 120 publications

References 18 publications

Do Judges Vary in Their Treatment of Race?

Do Judges Vary in Their Treatment of Race?

Free at Last? Judicial Discretion and Racial Disparities in Federal Sentencing

Felon Disenfranchisement Laws and the Feedback Loop of Political Exclusion: the Case of Florida

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