Prosecution-stage disparity research remains far less developed than policing and sentencing research

Evidence

The social science research on prosecution, and specifically on racial disparities in prosecution, is still in its infancy. This is especially evident when compared to a much larger body of research on policing and sentencing. Yet, among a few dozen studies on prosecution and racial disparities published since the early 1990s, researchers have managed to examine racial disparities across a wide range of offense categories, decision points, and jurisdictions. Most published studies found some form of racial disparities, both warranted and unwarranted. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 556

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Racial disparities research on prosecution remains sparse, unlike policing and sentencing (similarity 0.98)
• Prosecutors have only recently become willing to discuss racial disparities (similarity 0.87)
• Prosecutorial data is systematically unavailable for assessing racial disparities (similarity 0.87)
• Prosecutors recently treated racial disparity research as institutionally unacceptable (similarity 0.86)
• Racial disparity in plea bargaining is nearly unstudied despite its centrality (similarity 0.85)
• Offense-specific disparity data enables targeted policy intervention (similarity 0.85)
• Reducing racial disparities in prosecution requires offense-specific, decision-point-level data (similarity 0.84)
• Racial disparities vary across decision points, offenses, and jurisdictions (similarity 0.84)
• Even unbiased prosecutors can perpetuate racial disparity through inherited policies (similarity 0.83)
• Racial bias permeates every stage of the criminal justice system (similarity 0.83)
• Prosecutors attribute racial disparities to poverty and crime patterns rather than bias (similarity 0.83)
• Racial disparities in prosecution do not uniformly favor White defendants (similarity 0.82)
• Racial disparity in policing is distinct from proof of racism (similarity 0.82)
• Racial disparity counts as warranted only when legally relevant factors explain it (similarity 0.82)
• Studies find racial bias throughout justice-system actors including officers (similarity 0.82)