Racial Discrimination in Criminal Sentencing: A Critical Evaluation of the Evidence with Additional Evidence on the Death Penalty

Monetary Sanctions: Legal Financial Obligations in US Systems of Justice

“…After arrest, the odds of being released after paying bail are twice as high for incarcerated Caucasians compared to Latinos and African Americans (Schlesinger 2005). There is also abundant evidence that race has a significant effect on sentencing outcomes (Green 1961, Kleck 1981, Mitchell 2005, Spohn 2000. Western (2006), for example, shows that African-American and Latino men with low educational achievement, high unemployment, and low wages are more likely than equivalent Caucasian men to be ensnared in the criminal justice system.…”

Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Crime and Criminal Justice in the United States

“…Wave 1 studies were crude methodologically, and almost none controlled for legally relevant variables in assessing race effects. In an effort to ameliorate these limitations, wave 2 inspired a large number of studies that have been the subject of widely cited and influential reviews by Hagan (1974), Kleck (1981), and Hagan and Bumiller (1983). Kleck (1981) assessed fiftyseven studies, while Hagan and Bumiller (1983) reviewed more than sixty for the National Academy of Sciences.…”

Let My People Go: Ethnic In-Group Bias in Judicial Decisions - Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment

“…Hence, it is far from clear whether these disparate outcomes are the result of judges' ethnic and racial bias, or whether they result from omitted case characteristics that are correlated with ethnic identity (Abrams et al 2008). Kleck (1981) analyzed the American research on racial bias in sentencing and showed that the studies that appeared to find racial discrimination usually failed to adequately control for criminal record and other explanatory factors. More recent studies have led some commentators to conclude that there is little evidence of overt racial bias in sentencing (Klein et al 1990, Sampson and Lauritsen 1997: 362, Warner 2000.…”

“…The difficulty is that race and ethnicity are often correlated with other factors which have been found to significantly influence sentences, such as criminal record (Kleck, 1981), pretrial detention , unemployment (Chiricos and Bales, 1991), court appointed counseling (Holmes et al, 1996), crime type (Tonry¸ 1995), aggravated circumstances (Kleck, 1981) etc. ; and when these factors are controlled for, the independent effect of race loses all or most of its explanatory power in some of the studies.…”