The Racial Punishment Paradox: Why More Blacks Go to Prison Even When Judges Sentence More Equally

• In Event: Race, Sentencing & Punishment

Abstract

A mainstay of criminal sentencing research is that black defendants are, on average, treated more harshly than whites. But to what extent has this pattern changed over time, and how might we explain such variation? Further, do changes in the black-white disparity in sentencing map onto the trends in aggregate prison populations? We draw on 33 years of sentencing records (1981-2013; N>350,000) for the state of Minnesota to answer these questions. Our findings point to a ‘racial punishment paradox’: While the racial disparity in state imprisonment rates increased since 1980, the racial disparity in prison sentences decreased. We further investigate whether this incongruity between macro-level and case-level racial disparity is attributable to changes in arrest rates, drug laws, and racial disparities in sentence lengths.

Authors

• Lesley Schneider, The Ohio State University

• Ryan King, Ohio State University