Prosecutors have only recently become willing to discuss racial disparities

Evidence

As recently as a decade ago, talking to prosecutors about racial disparities was a third rail. Even if district or state attorneys had genuine interest in understanding whether and how their line prosecutors might make racially disparate decisions, selling this message externally—but even more so internally—presented a daunting task nipping any efforts to study race in the bud. I know this from my personal experience. While at the Vera Institute of Justice, we have tried to sell the racial disparity research ideas to prosecutors for years, and the vast majority of those conversations went nowhere. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 595

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Prosecutors recently treated racial disparity research as institutionally unacceptable (similarity 0.96)
• Prosecution-stage disparity research remains far less developed than policing and sentencing research (similarity 0.87)
• Racial disparities research on prosecution remains sparse, unlike policing and sentencing (similarity 0.87)
• Prosecutors attribute racial disparities to poverty and crime patterns rather than bias (similarity 0.85)
• Prosecutorial data is systematically unavailable for assessing racial disparities (similarity 0.85)
• Line prosecutors attribute racial disparities to poverty and minority culture, not bias (similarity 0.83)
• Sincere fairness goals do not prevent race-based misjudgment in prosecutors (similarity 0.83)
• Prosecutors rarely collect the data needed to detect racial bias (similarity 0.83)
• Racial bias permeates every stage of the criminal justice system (similarity 0.83)
• Racial disparity in plea bargaining is nearly unstudied despite its centrality (similarity 0.82)
• Racial bias pervades every domain rather than rare individuals (similarity 0.82)
• Prosecutorial diversity is advocated as a route to equitable case outcomes. (similarity 0.80)
• Reducing racial disparities in prosecution requires offense-specific, decision-point-level data (similarity 0.80)
• Racial disparities in prosecution do not uniformly favor White defendants (similarity 0.80)
• Even unbiased prosecutors can perpetuate racial disparity through inherited policies (similarity 0.80)