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Does Gender Modify the Effects of Race–ethnicity on Criminal Sanctioning? Sentences for Male and Female White, Black, and Hispanic Defendants

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Abstract

Using data from large urban courts for the years 1990–1996 and drawing from the “focal concerns” framework on case-process decision making, we examine the main and interactive effects of gender and race–ethnicity on sentence outcomes. The main focus of the present study is whether the effects of race–ethnicity (and gender) on sentence outcomes are similar or different across gender (and racial–ethnic) groups. Consistent with the findings of prior research, we find that female defendants receive more lenient sentences than male defendants and that black and Hispanic defendants receive less favorable treatment than white defendants. However, these main effects are strongly dependent on whether the sample is partitioned by gender or race–ethnicity. We find that race–ethnicity influences male but not female sentences. Conversely, gender strongly influences sentencing across all racial–ethnic groups. These findings are at odds with the traditional view that leniency in court sanctioning typically by-passes “women of color.” Instead, it appears that black and Hispanic female defendants actually benefit more from their “female” status than would be expected all else equal.

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Notes

  1. The research literature also provides some anecdotal observations of the intersection of gender and race–ethnicity at sentencing (see Daly 1994).

  2. Defendants convicted of murder and rape are excluded from the present study. There is no variation on the incarceration outcome for murder cases (i.e., all defendants are incarcerated) and there are an insufficient number of rape convictions involving female defendants for analysis.

  3. Although the best available sources of criminal history information are used for the original data collection, there are jurisdictional differences in access to some criminal history data sources. Some jurisdictions have access to FBI rap sheets, state criminal histories, and local record checks, while others are limited to state/local sources (Bureau of Justice Statistics 1999).

  4. All of the counties in New York are excluded from the present analysis because over 30% of the cases in these counties have missing incarceration data (i.e., information missing on the key dependent variable). However, we also ran the analysis including the NY counties and found that the results do not diverge much from those presented here.

  5. Holleran and Spohn (2004) provide evidence that we cannot assume that jail and prison sentences are the same or that extralegal and legal criteria predict these two outcomes (versus probation) similarly. In particular, they are concerned that the failure to differentiate between jail and prison may mask important qualitative differences in the sentences that different gender and racial/ethnic groups receive. To address this issue, we performed supplementary analyzes modeling the incarceration decision as a trichotomous outcome using multinomial logistic regression. Overall, we found that the results were very similar to the results using binomial logistic regression. For instance, regarding main effects, there were no statistically significant race/ethnicity differences in the likelihood of going to prison versus jail. Put differently, for black and Hispanic defendants, the odds of going to prison versus probation were the same as the odds of going to jail versus probation. For gender, however, there was a small but significantly greater likelihood that male defendants would be sentenced to prison rather than jail compared to female defendants. Looking at the interaction between gender and race/ethnicity, we found that the effect of gender for prison versus jail was the same for whites, blacks, and Hispanics. Looked at differently, partitioned by gender, there were no statistically significant racial/ethnic differences for prison versus jail among either female or male offenders. In sum, our supplementary analyzes revealed that besides a small main effect for gender in the jail vs. prison decision, the findings using multinomial logistic regression were the same as the findings using binomial logistic regression. For parsimony and because the results and story remain unchanged regardless of technique, we retain our logistic regression analysis results. Nonetheless, it is important to note that our use of a “total incarceration” variable may slightly understate the difference in the true punitiveness of the incarceration outcomes of male and female defendants.

  6. An important concern is that the omission of earlier processing decisions in the analysis might lead to sample selection bias in the race and gender estimates in our sentencing models. Because the SCPS data are concerned with the processing of a sample of formally charged felony defendants, less attrition occurs throughout the case process with this sample than with a more “raw” arrest sample. Of course, this is not a solution (i.e., attrition obviously occurred before the felony defendant sample was constructed), but it limits what we can do to “correct” for sample selection bias at the sentencing stage. Fortunately, the data set does provide information on dismissal and conviction decisions. Supplementary analyzes (not shown) demonstrate that “correcting” for sample selection bias possibly resulting from the differential probabilities of defendants reaching the sentencing stage does not significantly change the sentencing findings presented here.

  7. Contextual variables for county and sentencing year are omitted from the tables for space reasons. Regression results for these variables are available from the authors upon request.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from the American Statistical Association/Bureau of Justice Statistics Statistical Methodological Research Program and the Law and Society Program of the National Science Foundation. Core support was provided by the Population Research Institute at The Pennsylvania State University and the Center for Family and Demographic Research at Bowling Green State University.

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Correspondence to Stephen Demuth.

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Steffensmeier, D., Demuth, S. Does Gender Modify the Effects of Race–ethnicity on Criminal Sanctioning? Sentences for Male and Female White, Black, and Hispanic Defendants. J Quant Criminol 22, 241–261 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-006-9010-2

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