The New Face of Legal Inequality: Noncitizens and the Long-Term Trends in Sentencing Disparities across U.S. District Courts, 1992–2009

Abstract

In the wake of mass immigration from Latin America, legal scholars have shifted focus from racial to ethnic inequality under the law. A series of studies now suggest that Hispanics may be the most disadvantaged group in U.S. courts, yet this body of work has yet to fully engage the role of citizenship status. The present research examines the punishment consequences for non‐U.S. citizens sentenced in federal courts between 1992 and 2009. Drawing from work in citizenship studies and sociolegal inequality, I hypothesize that nonstate members will be punished more severely than U.S. citizens, and any trends in Hispanic ethnicity over this period will be linked to punitive changes in the treatment of noncitizens. In line with this hypothesis, results indicate a considerable punishment gap between citizens and noncitizens—larger than minority‐white disparities. Additionally, this citizenship “penalty” has increased at the incarceration stage, explaining the majority of the increase in Hispanic‐white disparity over the past two decades. As international migration increases, these findings call for greater theoretical and empirical breadth in legal inequality research beyond traditional emphases, such as race and ethnicity.

Detained: A Study of Immigration Bond Hearings

“…Finally, it is instructive to consider the broader contemporary trends in immigration law and policy that might influence—directly or indirectly—the decisional environments of immigration judges. Over the past few decades, the growing scope and the reach of crimmigration law have increasingly blurred the boundaries between immigration and crime control (see, e.g., Beckett and Evans ; Light ). Underlying this trend is the movement of immigration law toward the “crime control model”—one of the two classic models that Packer () originally developed to describe the workings of the criminal process.…”

Sentencing and State-Level Racial and Ethnic Contexts

“…Since Wheeler, Weisburd, and Bode's (1982) study, scholars typically have broken the sentencing decision into two distinct but related stages: the decision to incarcerate and the sentence length decision if incarcerated (King, Johnson, and McGeever ; Light ). This study follows that practice .…”

“…We re-ran the analyses using prison sentences only (i.e., prison versus jail and non-custodial sanctions); although substantively similar, none of the main and interactive effects associated with state-level racial and ethnic contexts approached statistical significance (results available upon request). The use of the total incarceration variable is consistent with the approach used in and recommended by a number of prior studies (e.g., King, Johnson, and McGeever 2010;Light 2014;Wheeler, Weisburd, and Nancy Bode 1982). 3 Because fewer than 3 percent of defendants were classified as "other" and because our focus is on racial and ethnic contexts, we removed these individuals from the analysis.…”

Locating the Judge within Sentencing Research

“…This attribution is inferred from the statistical findings which link independent variables with the dependent outcome variables. Because recidivism is never fully predictable, and defendant character cannot be known entirely, court actors make assessments of dangerousness, blameworthiness or other relevant factors, partially based on attributions about the defendant according to their gender, employment status, family situation and race (Daly 1989;Light 2014;Steffensmeier and Demuth 2001;Steffensmeier et al 1998). Ulmer (2012) and Kramer and Ulmer (1996) argue that legal factors, such as criminal history and crime severity, are used informally by judges as heuristics to assess blameworthiness and risks to community protection.…”

“…Claims about the judge, or judicial subjectivity, are sometimes inferred from correlations between the variables used to investigate sentencing patterns. Investigating variations, trends, disparities and disadvantage in sentencing outcomes entails modelling the effects of a series of independent variables on sentences (for example, Bushway and Piehl 2001;Bushway et al 2012;Fischman and Schanzenbach 2012;Light 2014;Wooldredge et al 2011). Typical independent variables relate to the nature of the offence and offender characteristics, usually race/ethnicity, gender, age and socio-economic status (Bond and Jeffries 2012;Doerner and Demuth 2010;Hood 1992;Jeffries and Bond 2013;Shute et al 2013).…”