Within-race skin tone predicts sentence length independent of legal factors

Evidence

Not only is discriminatory treatment by the CJS affected by the status of the social category to which one belongs—for example, White, Latino, and Black—it also is affected by the hue of one’s skin within these racial/ethnic categories. For example, in their study of 12,000 imprisoned Black women in North Carolina between 1995 and 2009, Viglione, Hannon, and DeFina (2011) discovered that skin tone, as perceived by correctional officers, was related to the length of one’s prison sentence and the actual length of time served. Controlling for a number of legally relevant factors, the darker a defendant’s skin tone, the longer the prison sentence the defendant was condemned to serve and the more time actually served. Similarly, using the data collected from male prisoners by the Georgia Department of Corrections, after controlling for legally relevant factors such as type of crime, the darker the skin tone of the Black defendants, the longer the prison term they received. However, there was no statistically significant difference between the sentences received by White prisoners and light-skinned Black prisoners (Burch, 2015). — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 52

Categorization

• XREF: Skin-tone gradient within race parallels the reader’s interest in how measured/objective treatment diverges from professed egalitarian conviction — connects to the Implicit Association Test literature and studies on colorism the reader knows from social psychology.
• SHARE: The light-skinned Black prisoners receiving statistically indistinguishable sentences from White prisoners is a precise finding worth sending to a colleague working on colorism or disparity research.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 52