New Studies find race plays a role in Judicial Decisions

Race & Justice News

A Reprint from The Sentencing Project)

 

Two recent studies, one based on adults in Cook County, Illinois, and the other based on juveniles in Pennsylvania, find evidence confirming that race plays a role in defendants being sentenced to incarceration. A study by David Abrams and colleagues found that 51 percent of black defendants versus 38 percent of whites were sentenced to prison. Race played a role in whether judges sent defendants to prison, but the degree to which race influenced such decisions varied widely among  judges. Their study is based on decades of data on felony sentencing in Cook County, Illinois.

A second study by George Higgins and others examined over 40,000 cases in the juvenile court system in Pennsylvania. After accounting for legal factors (e.g., judicial hearing, public attorney, and type of offense), extralegal factors (school attendance, family status, living arrangements, gender) and community factors (concentrated disadvantage, percent black, percent residential mobility, percent unemployment) the study found that blacks were 1.28 times more likely than whites to be sentenced to incarceration.

Size of African American population influences incarceration rates in surprising way 

Andres Rengifo and Don Stemen examined the relationship over time between the size of states’ African American populations, incarceration rates, and the abolition of discretionary parole.  They found, generally, that incarceration rates increase as the size of states’ African American populations increase, but that this relationship has weakened over time. They theorize that this is because new categories of offenders (e.g., sex offenders, parole violators) are emerging as the “dangerous populations.” According to Rengifo and Stemen, this does not discount the role of race in triggering more punitive policies such as taking away discretion in releasing people from prison. However, they found a paradoxical relationship between punitive policies and incarceration rates. Specifically, they found that in states with small African American populations, removing parole discretion was associated with higher rates of incarceration (i.e., punitive policies raise the level of incarceration for everyone). When the African American population is high, however, incarceration rates are lower in states that have abolished discretionary release than in states that allow discretion in releasing people from prison. Rengifo and Stemen hypothesize that in states with proportionately more African Americans, limiting discretion in the parole decision benefits African Americans.