Racial disparities in sentencing can arise without any judicial bias or discrimination

Evidence

It is a well-documented fact that judicial outcomes are correlated with defendants’ personal attributes. For example, Blacks are more than four times as likely to be incarcerated as Whites (Wagner, 2012). In 2015, the U.S. population was 13 percent Black (U.S. Department of Commerce, 2018) while the U.S. state prison population was 38 percent Black (Carson, 2015), and Black death row inmates constituted more than 40 percent of all death row inmates (Statistica Research Department, 2019). Such disparities in judicial outcomes between groups of individuals, however, do not imply disparate treatment. A number of differences between the groups can cause these disparities. For instance, the arrest rate of Blacks for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter (arrests per Black population) is more than six times higher in comparison to the arrest rate of Whites for the same crime (FBI, 2018; U.S. Department of Commerce, 2018). Even if there was no racial inequality in any intermediate step of the judicial process between arrest and sentencing, a higher Black arrest rate for murder would lead to disproportionate representation of Blacks on death row. In other words, given such differences in arrest rates, no matter how impartial and fair judges are, outcomes would still be racially disparate. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 726

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on base-rate disparities and the Simpson’s paradox-style reasoning where group outcome gaps need not imply group treatment gaps.
• QUESTION: The arrest-rate gap itself presumably reflects upstream bias — worth chasing whether the argument acknowledges where disparate arrest rates come from.

Related

• Racial disparities in incarceration can stem from arrest-rate differences alone, without any judicial bias. (similarity 0.96)
• Racial incarceration disparities persist even after controlling for arrest rates (similarity 0.84)
• Racial sentencing disparities do not reveal which group is treated wrongly (similarity 0.84)
• Observed race disparities in sentencing do not fully capture judicial bias. (similarity 0.82)
• Race still sways sentencing even after legal factors dominate outcomes (similarity 0.81)
• Measured sentencing gaps do not reveal which group gets the unfair treatment (similarity 0.81)
• Racial sentencing disparities can arise from case sorting even with unbiased judges (similarity 0.81)
• Observed sentencing disparities do not necessarily prove judge discrimination (similarity 0.80)
• Individual judges vary widely in how they sentence minority versus white defendants (similarity 0.80)
• Racial disparities compound at every stage of the criminal justice process (similarity 0.79)
• Post-2000s drug incarceration racial disparities contracted as Black arrests fell (similarity 0.78)