Educational Attainment and Sentencing: Assessing the Effects of Education on Federal Sentencing Outcomes, 2018-2020

• In Event: Influence of Extralegal Factors on Sentencing Outcomes

Abstract

A defendant’s education is a personal characteristic that has almost always been included in sentencing disparity research as a control variable. However, it has rarely been a variable of interest. Hence, it is still rather difficult to understand the true impact of one’s education level on federal sentencing outcomes. Considering one’s education can be one of the most influential social categories and most impactful on one’s experience in the criminal justice system, there is a need to understand its influence on defendants’ sentencing outcomes (mainly incarceration decision and prison sentence length), while interacting with other personal characteristics, such as race and gender. Using United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) Monitoring of Federal Criminal Sentences (MFCS) data (2018 – 2020), this study attempts to examine the impact of a defendant’s (1) education level, (2) race, and (3) gender (and a combination of these categories) on incarceration and sentence length decisions based on different types of offenses. Through these analyses, this study seeks to understand how the social indicators above can have a varying degree of influence on one’s sentencing outcome, based on offense type.

Authors

• Doyun Koo, University of Cincinnati / University of Memphis

• Bryan Holmes, Florida State University

• Ben Feldmeyer, University of Cincinnati