Nickel and Dimed for Drug Crime: Cumulative Racial Inequality in State Courts

• In Event: 477 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 06. Procedures and Justice 1

Abstract

Past research has demonstrated that those arrested for drug crimes is not representative of drug use, suggesting that the implementation of drug policy is highly racialized and unequal. We know much less about where and how racial inequality is reproduced within the criminal justice system, however. My central research question is: where and how is racial inequality cumulatively produced in the criminal justice system for drug defendants? Drawing from organizational scholarship and literature on “cumulative disadvantage” or “cumulative inequality,” I examine this question by analyzing State Court Processing Statistics data to find where and how race produces unequal court processing and outcome decisions in the state court systems, while accounting for the effects of previous stages in later stages of the court process. In accordance with cumulative racial inequality, racial disparities at any one stage were not necessarily excessively large. When multiple stages are taken into account, however, a picture of a justice system that steadily discriminates against Black and Latino drug defendants emerges. I also find that pretrial detention and diversionary programs in particular act as a "sorting mechanism" for White drug offenders. Finally, Black and Latino defendants are kept under criminal justice system control for longer periods of time, but through different mechanisms. For example, Black defendants are far more likely to go to prison, and will more consistently go to prison regardless of previous number of arrests, but Latino defendants receive, on average, a longer prison sentence.

Author

• Marisa Kei Omori, University of California-Irvine