Does Pretrial Status Explain Racial Disparity in Sentencing Outcomes? A Decomposition Analysis

Abstract

More than two-thirds of jail inmates are unconvicted—i.e. detained pretrial. Detention status has been shown to have substantial downstream effects on criminal case processing, ranging from the likelihood of conviction to sentence outcomes. Yet, most sentencing studies lack information on detention status, leading to concerns of omitted variable bias as a possible explanation for any observed racial disparity. This study seeks to determine the extent to which pretrial status accounts for racial differences in sentencing. In addition to the standard release files from the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, we incorporate supplemental data on bail decisions to determine whether—and why—defendants were detained pretrial. We use general linear models decomposition to determine the degree to which pretrial status differences and the differential impact of pretrial status across groups account for observed differences between Black, White, and Hispanic defendants’ likelihood of incarceration and departure and incarceration length.