Socioeconomic Bias in Risk Assessment and Sentencing

• In Event: Roundtable: Class Inequality in Criminal Justice Policies and Practices

Abstract

Widely-used risk assessment tools that inform sentencing decisions take into account socioeconomic characteristics of offenders among which education, employment, income and housing. In general risk assessment tools such as LSI-R (Canada, U.S.), COMPAS (U.S.), OASys (U.K.) and RISc (the Netherlands), socioeconomic marginality contributes to a higher risk score, which increases the likelihood of a (longer) custodial sentence for underprivileged offenders. While bias has been addressed in relation to gender and race/ethnicity, the problem of socioeconomic bias in itself has received little attention. In addition to legal-normative objections, including socioeconomic marginality in risk assessment and sentencing is problematic given the already marginalized position of offenders who come before a judge and the adverse effects of imprisonment on the life course. Through unravelling the role of negative identification and rationalization in risk assessment, I examine how sentencing based on biased risk assessment contributes to socioeconomic disparities in sentencing as well as how risk assessment might play a role in how criminal justice systems reproduce social inequality in societies.

Author

• Gwen van Eijk, Leiden University