Abstract
The presence of inequalities in criminal punishment according to defendants’ race, ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic status arguably challenges the philosophical and moral foundations of the justice system. Nevertheless, there is clear evidence of disproportional representation according to these offender characteristics in US correctional populations. For this reason, much criminological research over the past 50 years, and especially within the past two decades, has been devoted to examining judicial decision-making at the sentencing stage of criminal justice processing. This chapter provides a brief overview of this literature, which consistently has shown that minority defendants, males, and those of lower socioeconomic status receive disparately harsh penalties, even after a host of other legal and extralegal factors are accounted for. Additionally, we discuss the research exploring the individual- and contextual-level conditions under which these inequalities appear to be more or less pronounced. Following this review, we present the theoretical frameworks which sentencing scholars most often have used to explain these patterns, and we emphasize in particular the potential role of implicit biases held and acted upon by criminal justice actors. We conclude by describing several areas where policy reform might reduce these disparities and ensure a more equitable system of punishment.
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Lehmann, P.S., Gomez, A.I. (2022). Racial, Ethnic, Gender, and Economic Sentencing Disparity. In: Jeglic, E., Calkins, C. (eds) Handbook of Issues in Criminal Justice Reform in the United States. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77565-0_8
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