Race and Sentencing Research Advancements

Abstract

Race and ethnicity have profound impacts on the sentencing of people convicted for criminal offenses. In a sentencing context, racial/ethnic disparity can be defined as any difference in the type of sentence a person receives (e.g., a community-based sanction or incarceration) or the length of their sentence, regardless of the reason for this distinction. A vast corpus of criminological literature dating from the 1970s to the 2000s has found direct and indirect race/ethnicity effects in sentence decision-making. Racial considerations in the form of prejudice and discrimination directly influence sentence type and sentence length decisions. Race and ethnicity may indirectly affect sentencing as these identities shape perceptions of risk held by court actors, prior involvement with the criminal justice system, and decisions to process a case at earlier decision points. Literature reviews and meta-analyses confirm these various race/ethnicity effects across temporal and geographic contexts. Since the 2010s, scholarship has sought to advance understandings of how race and ethnicity play roles in sentencing. A growing corpus of research focuses on inequalities that emerge at early decision-making stages like bail or pretrial detention and compound as a case moves toward its final disposition. Alternative methods to traditional multiple regression analysis have shown different ways to estimate race/ethnicity effects on sentencing outcomes. Access to new forms of case information has allowed scholars to consider the interplay of legal factors like offense type or criminal history and extralegal considerations like the racial/ethnic identities of the alleged victim and offender to forge disparities. Mapping techniques have encouraged scholars to explore how community contexts where people live or allegedly offend correlate with court outcomes. Other scholarship has moved beyond traditional focuses on racial/ethnic disparities involving Black, Latino/Hispanic, and White defendants by considering the places of immigration and indigenous status in criminal courts.