Abstract

Sentencing reform has guided criminal justice processing in federal courts since the passage of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 (hereafter, SRA 1984). Despite changes in case law and legislation, the academic and political community has been seeking to understand the persistence of unwarranted disparities, based on extra-legal factors, in the sentencing of federal offenders. Although reform resulted in safeguards against unwarranted disparities through federal sentencing guidelines, the empirical literature continues to find that offenders with similar case characteristics receive different sentences based on personal factors like gender, race, age, and other such factors.

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