A Meta-Analysis of Race and Sentencing Research: Explaining the Inconsistencies

By Ojmarrh Mitchell. 2005

475 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/daae7491f97c349da7e774528733519ea8d4e498

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Citations in the corpus

A Multilevel Test of Minority Threat Effects on Sentencing (2010, background): “We focus here specifically on Blalock’s (1967) arguments because they have been central to a broader literature on social threat and social control (e.g., King 2007; King and Wheelock 2007; Mitchell 2005; Ruddell and Urbina 2004) and, more specifically, because they accord with the unifying theme ”
Race and Cumulative Discrimination in the Prosecution of Criminal Defendants (2013, background): “To illustrate, in his recent summary of the race punishment literature, Mitchell (2005) found that 37% of the 71 studies reviewed only probed the effect of a defendant’s race on the likelihood of imprisonment.”
Distinguishing Race Effects on Pre-Trial Release and Sentencing Decisions (2012, background): “Mitchell (2005) was unable to conduct a meta-analysis of interaction effects between a defendant’s race and other extra-legal characteristics, such as sex and age, which he acknowledged was a limitation due to a body of research offering empirical evidence of such effects.”
Examining Racial Disparities in Drug Arrests (2015, background): “…such as mandatory minimum sentences) find that even after taking into account measures of current offense seriousness and prior criminal conduct African-Americans convicted of drug crimes are treated more punitively than whites (for reviews of this research see Mitchell, 2005; Spohn, 2000).”
Assessing the Impact of First-Time Imprisonment on Offenders’ Subsequent Criminal Career Development: A Matched Samples Comparison (2009, background): “Specifically judges can be expected to more likely impose a prison sentence on individuals with more extensive criminal careers (Mitchell 2005; Spohn 2000).”
Reassessing and Redirecting Research on Race and Sentencing (2013, methodology): “Using words like “often” and “relatively small” casts a sheen of vagueness to this general assessment, but providing additional details unfortunately does not clarify things much because the broader story is that defendant race effects appear to be highly contingent on sample composition, crime type”
The Independent and Joint Effects of Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Age on Sentencing Outcomes in U.S. Federal Courts (2010, unknown): “sentencing differences in state and federal courts also find that black defendants tend to receive harsher sentences than similarly situated white defendants (Albonetti, 1997; Demuth & Steffensmeier, 2004; Mitchell, 2005; Steffensmeier & Demuth, 2000, 2001; Steffensmeier et al., 1998).”
Actuarial Sentencing: An “Unsettled” Proposition (2013, background): “Risk research has shown that racial minorities have different self-reported needs (Durrance & Williams, 2003 ; Gavazzi, Yarcheck, & Lim, 2005 ; Mitchell, 2005 ) and that race and ethnicity can influence practitioners’ attribution of risk factors to offenders (Harcourt, 2007 ; Hudson & Bramhall, ”