Race and Imprisonment Decisions

The possible race differences in judicial sentencing have been of long-standing interest to social scientists. We argue, however, that prior research on the issue either uses crude measures of offense severity and prior record, or, if more precise measures are employed, is limited to one or a few offenses. The Pennsylvania guidelines sentencing data used in this report allow a more rigorous test of the racial hypothesis since they include detailed information on these two most important legal variables, on other variables for statistical controls, and on a fairly comprehensive list of common law offenses, with an adequate sample size. The data—analyzed with both additive and interaction models—reveal that race (net of other factors) has a small effect on judicial decision-making as it pertains to the likelihood of incarceration but has negligible effect on the length of imprisonment decision. The small race effect at the in/out decision is accounted for by dispositional departures in sentencing that favor white defendants. Offense severity is overwhelmingly the major factor influencing judicial sentencing, followed at some distance by prior record. At the end of the report, we discuss the implications of our findings for research on sentencing and for policies aimed at reducing the high incarceration rate of black males.