Racial, Ethnic, Gender, and Economic Sentencing Disparity

Abstract

The presence of inequalities in criminal punishment according to defendants' race, ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic status arguably challenges the philosophical and moral foundations of the justice system. Nevertheless, there is clear evidence of disproportional representation according to these offender characteristics in US correctional populations. For this reason, much criminological research over the past 50 years, and especially within the past two decades, has been devoted to examining judicial decision-making at the sentencing stage of criminal justice processing. This chapter provides a brief overview of this literature, which consistently has shown that minority defendants, males, and those of lower socioeconomic status receive disparately harsh penalties, even after a host of other legal and extralegal factors are accounted for. Additionally, we discuss the research exploring the individual-and contextual-level conditions under which these inequalities appear to be more or less pronounced. Following this review, we present the theoretical frameworks which sentencing scholars most often have used to explain these patterns, and we emphasize in particular the potential role of implicit biases held and acted upon by criminal justice actors. We conclude by describing several areas where policy reform might reduce these disparities and ensure a more equitable system of punishment. Keywords Race and ethnicity • Gender • Socioeconomic status • Sentencing guidelines • Judicial discretionThe possibility that defendants convicted in criminal courts are subjected to punishments in ways that are patterned according to their race, gender, age, or socioeconomic status (SES) compromises the very foundation upon which the justice system is built (Franklin, 2018;Tonry, 1995). Indeed, Ulmer (2019, p. 1145) argues that "sentencing is a window into a society's, and a community's, cultural and social production of who and what is considered deserving of sanction," and thus the

The trial tax and the intersection of race/ethnicity, gender, and age in criminal court sentencing.

“…Notably, however, young Black males received lengthier prison sentences than White defendants regardless of gender and age. The observation that more pronounced racial/ethnic inequalities were present in the incarceration decision than in sentence length has been noted in several reviews of sentencing research (e.g., Baumer, 2013;Lehmann & Gomez, 2022;Mitchell, 2005;Spohn, 2000), with scholars positing that disparities in the latter outcome might be obfuscated by sentencing guidelines structures (Bushway & Piehl, 2001) or the unequal process of "cumulative disadvantage" resulting from decision-making at earlier justice system decision points (Kurlychek & Johnson, 2019;Kutateladze et al, 2014;Omori, 2019;Wooldredge et al, 2015).…”

“…Though much scholarship reveals that mode of conviction is one of the strongest case-level correlates of sentencing outcomes, researchers also have long observed that defendants are punished in ways that are patterned according to their race/ethnicity. Indeed, hundreds of studies following this line of inquiry have been conducted over the past half-century, and comprehensive reviews of this body of work report consistent evidence of such disparities across a wide range of jurisdictions, sentencing structures, and defendant subpopulations (e.g., Baumer, 2013;Franklin, 2018;Lehmann & Gomez, 2022;Mitchell, 2005;Spohn, 2000;Ulmer, 2012). Notably, the finding that Black and-to a somewhat lesser extent-Hispanic defendants are disadvantaged at sentencing persists even after offense type, criminal history, prior case-processing decisions, local court context, and other similar factors are accounted for.…”