Sentencing scorecards: Reducing racial disparities in prison sentences at their source

Abstract

Scorecards have become an increasingly common tool for public policy decision making about important issues in education, finance, and health care. Few scorecards have been applied in criminal justice and none has been developed to highlight racial disparities in incarceration. We constructed county-level scorecards for racial disparities in incarceration rates for the New York State Permanent Commission on Sentencing. Using detailed data on felony cases in New York State between 2000 and 2014, including the specific penal law criminal offense, features of the underlying charges, and criminal history, we assembled a set of White defendants within each county that collectively resembled Black and Hispanic defendants in that county. Statewide, Black defendants were more likely to receive prison sentences than similar White defendants (43% vs. 40%). Some individual counties had much greater racial disparities with relative risks of prison as high as 1.36. We found similar results for Hispanic defendants. Policy Implications: Early institutional support for our scorecard receded once racial disparities were flagged in specific, named counties. The scorecard was never deployed by the Commission. Commission members and the research team met with individual counties but the Commission was disbanded during this process. New York State still lacks a formal sentencing commission. We recommend future scorecard efforts

Federal criminal sentencing: race-based disparate impact and differential treatment in judicial districts

“…extend previous work that, irrespective of race, identifies substantial inter-jurisdictional discrepancies in sentencing outcomes within state systems (Ridgeway et al, 2020;Wright, 2012) and the federal system (Harries and Lura, 1973;United States Sentencing Commission, 2020a;Wu and Spohn, 2010).…”

Prior punishments and cumulative disadvantage: How supervision status impacts prison sentences*

“…We observed demographic differences in rural and urban courts, along with rural courts sentencing defendants with straddle cell cases to prison more often. Similarly, prior research in Michigan has shown wide variation in sentences received within individual grid cells across counties (Council of State Governments Justice Center, 2014; see Ridgeway et al., 2020, for an analysis of county‐level variation in punishment in New York). Yet we are not able to explore the possible theoretical mechanisms through which informal consequences operate differently in different court contexts.…”

Cumulative Racial and Ethnic Disparities Along the School-to-Prison Pipeline

“…Note, however, that our results therefore likely provide conservative estimates of the effects explored. We encourage future scholarship on this topic to employ alternative methods that can better account for some of these issues (e.g., MacDonald and Donnelly 2019; Ridgeway et al 2020).…”