The American justice system has come under close scrutiny over the past few years. A multitude of heartbreaking cases from Eric Garner to Tamir Rice have sparked movements calling for a comprehensive overhaul of both police and court systems. And now, more scientific studies than ever are backing up these calls with hard evidence of racial bias.
The newest study on racial bias in the courtroom comes via South Carolina. First published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology it examines how a judge’s inherent racial bias might impact sentencing between those found guilty of similar crimes.
There have been prior studies that have looked into this issue before. One notable study from 2005 found that younger black and Latino men were given harsher sentences for committing the same crimes as white offenders.
Yet in this new study, the cases they looked at were not from a broad spectrum of offenders, including violent crimes, where most people would conclude a harsh prison sentence is either mandatory or preferred. Rather, it focused on “liberation bias,” where lesser, nonviolent crimes allow judges to use their own discretion when it came to sentencing.
Researchers from the University of Sheffield analyzed over 17,000 court cases from South Carolina and found that, “Black people with lower levels of criminal history were more likely than white people to be jailed, with the likelihood of incarceration increasing by as much as 43 per cent for those with no past criminal history to ten per cent for those with moderate criminal history.”
However, interestingly when severity of the crime was intensified, white offenders actually received longer average sentences than their black counterparts. Meaning petty crimes have a much higher impact on incarceration overall within the nation, and within the black community.
And these penalties on low-level, nonviolent offenders have the most substantial impact on the US prison system. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, more…