Priming unconscious racial stereotypes about adolescent offenders.

Abstract

Two studies examined unconscious racial stereotypes of decision makers in the juvenile justice system. Police officers (Experiment 1) and juvenile probation officers (Experiment 2) were subliminally exposed to words related to the category Black or to words neutral with respect to race. In a presumably unrelated task, officers read 2 vignettes about a hypothetical adolescent who allegedly committed either a property crime (shoplifting from a convenience store) or an interpersonal crime (assaulting a peer). The race of the offender was left unstated and the scenarios were ambiguous about the causes of the crime. Respondents rated the hypothetical offender on a number of traits (e.g., hostility and immaturity) and made judgments about culpability, expected recidivism, and deserved punishment. They also completed a self-report measure of conscious attitudes about race. As hypothesized, officers in the racial prime condition reported more negative trait ratings, greater culpability, and expected recidivism, and they endorsed harsher punishment than did officers in the neutral condition. The effects of the racial primes were not moderated by consciously held attitudes about African Americans. The implications of the findings for racial disparity in the juvenile justice system and for changing unconscious stereotypes were discussed.

Reassessing and Redirecting Research on Race and Sentencing

“…The evidence is not strongly supportive of the idea that court official perceptions of youth from different racial groups mediate the influence of race on sentencing outcomes (in this case, recommendations), and others have critiqued the conclusions drawn from this study (e.g. Graham & Lowry, 2004), but it nonetheless serves as a good example of the type of research that can help to advance our understanding of how the perceptions of racial minorities held by legal decision-makers may influence sentencing outcomes. There are, of course, other good examples in the literature of studies that inspect more closely the thoughts and feelings of courtroom decision-makers (e.g.…”

“…One recent example of the kind of experimental study that represents a good supplement to existing efforts to detect racial discrimination is Rachlinski, Johnson, Wistrich, and Guthrie's (2009) study of unconscious racial bias among trial judges, in which judges were recruited from a variety of contexts and given Implicit Association Tests (IAT) and then evaluated in terms of how unconscious biases affect sanction choices in hypothetical cases. This study and others like it in the area of mock jury decision-making illustrate nicely the kind of research that could enhance current scholarship on race and sentencing (Eberhardt, Davies, Purdie-Vaughns, & Johnson, 2006;Graham & Lowry, 2004;Levinson, 2007;Levinson & Young, 2010). Such studies serve as an example that this type of research is feasible, and they stimulate interest in applying similar approaches to other samples (e.g.…”

Attributions and Institutional Processing: How Focal Concerns Guide Decision-Making in the Juvenile Court

“…These attributions about youth then shaped officials' assessments of the threat of future crime and sentence recommendations. Graham and Lowry (2004) critique Bridges and Steen and suggest that attributions about adolescent offenders by court officials involve a more complex set of characterizations involving more than just the assessment of external and internal factors. In addition to whether a cause of delinquency is considered internal or external to a person, Graham and Lowry (2004) examine how controllability and stability influence processing.…”

Peer Victimization, Aggression, and Their Co-Occurrence in Middle School: Pathways to Adjustment Problems

“…On the other hand, some forms of ritualized teasing that have prosocial (group bonding) functions within African American culture, like "playin the dozens" and "signifyin," might be interpreted incorrectly by others as verbal harassment (e.g., Boxer, 1997). And racial stereotypes that associate being Black with violence and hostility are pervasive enough in this culture that perceivers may unknowingly attribute ambiguous behavior by African American youth to aggressive rather than benign intent (e.g., Devine, 1989;Graham & Lowery, 2004). In other analyses with this sample, we found that teachers also perceived African American boys as more aggressive than their peers from other ethnic groups and that these boys were more likely to be suspended from school (Markoe, 2003).…”