, and numerous seminar participants for helpful comments and suggestions. Molly Bunke, Kevin DeLuca, Sabrina Lee, and Amy Wickett provided excellent research assistance. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Treasury. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
Silver, Alex Torgovitsky, and numerous seminar participants for helpful comments and suggestions. Molly Bunke, Kevin DeLuca, and Amy Wickett provided excellent research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
Over 20 percent of prison and jail inmates in the UnitedEach year, more than 11 million individuals around the world are imprisoned prior to conviction. The United States leads all other countries with approximately half a million individuals detained before trial on any given day, nearly double the next highest country, China (Walmsley 2013). The high rate of pretrial detention in the United States is due to both the widespread use of monetary bail and the limited financial resources of most defendants. Nationwide, less than 25 percent of felony defendants are released without financial conditions, and the typical felony defendant is assigned a bail amount of more than $55,000
This paper investigates whether judge political affiliation contributes to racial and gender disparities in sentencing using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge. Exploiting random case assignment, we find that Republican-appointed judges sentence black defendants to 3.0 more months than similar nonblacks and female defendants to 2.0 fewer months than similar males compared to Democratic-appointed judges, 65 percent of the baseline racial sentence gap and 17 percent of the baseline gender sentence gap, respectively. These differences cannot be explained by other judge characteristics and grow substantially larger when judges are granted more discretion.
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