Racial disparities vary across decision points, offenses, and jurisdictions

Evidence

There are a number of takeaways from the New York and Florida projects. First, racial and ethnic disparities do exist and they manifest themselves differently across different decision points and offense categories. Second, there are decision points where racial disparities are nearly nonexistent (for example, in judicial case dismissals, as shown in figures 4.1, 4.3, and 4.4). Third, when disparities exist, it is not always Black and Hispanic defendants who are treated most punitively. Fourth, the nature and scope of disparities likely vary by jurisdictions, and even the few case studies described above showed that. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 588

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Racial disparities in prosecution vary by decision point and group (similarity 0.88)
• Prosecutorial dismissals show the widest racial-ethnic divergence across groups (similarity 0.86)
• Racial disparities research on prosecution remains sparse, unlike policing and sentencing (similarity 0.85)
• Prosecution-stage disparity research remains far less developed than policing and sentencing research (similarity 0.84)
• Racial disparities compound at every stage of the criminal justice process (similarity 0.82)
• Racial bias in criminal case outcomes varies by decision point and offense type (similarity 0.81)
• Offense-specific disparity data enables targeted policy intervention (similarity 0.81)
• Racial disparities in prosecution do not uniformly favor White defendants (similarity 0.80)
• Racial bias permeates every stage of the criminal justice system (similarity 0.80)
• Racial sentencing disparities do not reveal which group is treated wrongly (similarity 0.80)
• Aggregate racial disparities in prosecution can reverse direction when filtered by offense category (similarity 0.80)
• Racial disparity in plea bargaining is nearly unstudied despite its centrality (similarity 0.80)
• Prosecutors attribute racial disparities to poverty and crime patterns rather than bias (similarity 0.79)
• Racial bias operates pervasively across all life domains (similarity 0.79)
• Observed race disparities in sentencing do not fully capture judicial bias. (similarity 0.79)