"The study concluded that when the three criteria were considered together, there was a surprising pattern. Gender, more than race or age, was by far the number one indicator of sentencing disparity."

I've often complained about the female sentencing discount, and recently reader Garrett Luttrell, a paralegal, sent in an interesting letter about a recent study on it.  Luttrell writes:

A couple years back there was a huge study done by the Pennsylvania Commission on racial and gender discrimination in the courts, and the results were published in 2004 as the ‘Final Report of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Committee on Racial and Gender Bias in the Justice System’.

Most of the study was predictably biased and based on anecdotal ‘evidence’, but in the section on criminal sentencing, they had a large and seemingly well done study – performed specifically for the Commission – on sentencing disparity based on combinations of gender, race, and age. The section was called 'Sentencing Disparities in the Criminal Justice System’ and was published along with the Report in 2004.

The study concluded that when the three criteria were considered together, there was a surprising pattern. Gender, more than race or age, was by far the number one indicator of sentencing disparity.

On top of that, the perceived improvements in racial disparity were only being masked by the fact that minority women (blacks and Hispanics, but mostly blacks) were being treated even more leniently than their white counterparts.

On the other hand, minority men were being treated worse than their white counterparts, with the result that racial disparity appeared to be disappearing when in fact it was not. When the various combinations of race (white, black, Hispanic), age (over or under 30), and gender were combined, the study listed the combinations in order from least likely to get jail time or serve a shorter sentence to most likely to get jail time or serve a longer sentence: young black females got the best treatment while older Hispanic males got the worst.
 
Sadly, the Commission has declined to act on the study, instead attempting to get another study done that will not consider gender or age, and will only take capital crimes into account. The initial study is being buried, and I’ve been trying to get someone to give it some attention, so far without any luck.

If you go to the webpage, the report is on here, the study is in Appendix 1, Chapter 4, PDF format. It’s a large file, and the study really is buried…page 449 out of 910. The study was performed by two Sociology professors from Penn State, specializing in ‘Crime, Law, and Justice’ – John H. Kramer and Jeffery T. Ulmer.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Crime/Criminal Justice System/Police, Sexism. You can trackback from your own site.