The Racialized Packaging of Punishment: A Mixture Model Approach

• In Event: Fear, Crime Classification, and Disparity

Abstract

Research on racial disparities in the sentencing phase of the criminal legal system generally examines isolated sentencing decisions, rather than the broader “package” of punishment that many defendants experience. We ask to what extent the broader punishment "packages" - combinations of confinement, probation, and monetary sanction amounts - a defendant receives is shaped by defendant race. Leveraging Minnesota administrative court data from 2004-2022, we empirically identify punishment packages using Gaussian Mixture Modeling (GMM) Latent Profile Analysis with a concomitant multinomial regression to model package membership. We identify three packages: 1) heavy punishment - characterized by high amounts of all punishment modes, 2) community punishment - moderate probation and LFO amounts, and 3) monetary exclusive. Our models show that, net of various legal and case characteristics such as charge severity, criminal history, and offense mix, non-white defendants are associated with an increased odds of receiving the heavy punishment package, and a reduced odds of the monetary exclusive package. These results provide evidence of the racialized nature of how punishment is packaged above and beyond each isolated modality. These results show that punishment can, and perhaps should, be modeled as it is often experienced -- as a constitutive package of costs, surveillance, and confinement.

Authors

• Ryan P. Larson, Hamline University

• Christopher Uggen, University of Minnesota

• Robert Stewart, University of Maryland

• Veronica L. Horowitz, University at Buffalo, SUNY