Offender Ethnicity and Presentence Decision-Making

Abstract

Multiple discriminant analyses were performed to examine the sentencing recommendations of clinicians versus caseworkers for white, Mexican-American, and black male offenders, both before and after controlling for selected criminological characteristics of these ethnic groups. Though generally of small magnitude, discrimination effects favoring whites for relatively lenient case dispositions were larger for caseworkers than for clinicians and remained statistically significant only for caseworkers after holding constant criminological variables. The results are discussed in terms of the need for decreasing the discretion of decision makers through the use of guidelines that contain expected decision outcomes.