Abstract
The January 2017 issue of Race and Justice: An International Journal (RAJ) is noteworthy in two respects. First, it marks the beginning of RAJ’s seventh year of being a premier outlet for research examining the intersection of race and ethnicity with crime and justice system outcomes. RAJ encourages a diversity of topics, including critical examinations of race/ethnicity and the criminal justice system, while maintaining a commitment to scientific rigor. We look forward to continuing our mission in 2017 and beyond.
Second, this is a special issue focusing on race and court processes and outcomes. Racial disparity and discrimination pervade the justice system, but aside from a select few egregious examples, it is difficult to point a finger at any single, significant source of racially disparate outcomes. The accumulative nature of racial disparity and discrimination highlights the importance of courts in the criminal justice process. It is here that a suspect becomes a defendant, a defendant becomes an offender, and a person’s life is forever changed by factors largely beyond his or her control.
The four articles constituting this special issue tap into topics pertaining to outcomes and processes. In “Examining the Sources of Racial Bias in Potentially Capital Cases: A Case Study of Police and Prosecutorial Discretion,” Nick Petersen extends the discussion of racial disparities and discrimination in capital sentencing to consider the potential influence of victim race on homicide clearance probabilities. Petersen’s analysis of incident-level homicide arrest and charging data in Los Angeles County, CA, reveals that those who kill Latinos are less likely to be arrested than those who kill Whites, although there is no such effect for killers of Black victims. Racial dyad interaction terms in analyses of prosecutorial charging decisions show that, compared to Whites accused of killing Whites, Blacks charged with killing Blacks or Latinos and Latinos charged with the murder of other Latinos are significantly less likely to face charges that could result in the death penalty. Defendants of all races face the highest probability of death-eligible charges when the victim is White.
Petersen’s findings highlight an intriguing feature of the death penalty: Death penalty prosecutions are an instance where it is not just harshness but leniency that can be a sign of racial discrimination. Prosecutors’ stronger tendency to proceed with capital charges when victims are White sends a message about the social valuation of the lives of people of color. While an expanded use of capital punishment for a larger class of victims is unlikely to be academics’ favored policy recommendation, there is little room to argue against the proposition that systematically treating Blacks’ and Latinos’ killers more leniently than Whites’ killers is a devaluation of Black and brown life.
Petersen’s findings with regard to lower clearance rates for Latino homicide victims speak to the potential for racial disparity and discrimination to begin well before the charging stage; those who kill Whites apparently face greater certainty of punishment, in addition to enhanced severity. Exactly why many Latino-victim homicides are not cleared remains an open question. Police, it seems, need to reexamine their approach to homicide investigation and possibly to their relationships with minority residents and communities to send the message that murdering a person of color is not an act that can be committed with impunity.
In the next article, “Spatial Dimensions of Racial Inequality: Neighborhood Racial Characteristics and Drug Sentencing,” Marisa Omori adds to the literature on race effects on drug sentencing by incorporating neighborhood characteristics measuring area rates of minority population and criminal punishment. Neighborhood profiling has come to be a recognized contributor to the profiling of individuals. Most cities harbor “bad” neighborhoods infamous for their (allegedly) high rates of crime and social disarray. Residents of these maligned areas find themselves tainted with guilt by association, an outcome rendered particularly unjust by the fact that the amorphous term “high-crime area” has no definition and smacks of racialization.
Combining aggregated case-level felony drug filing data with block group-level Census and crime data in Sacramento, CA, Omori examines the impact of neighborhood racial, social, economic, and crime characteristics on the numbers and lengths of prison, jail, and probation sentences experienced in each area. Findings show that neighborhood racial composition’s impact on drug sentences varies both by race (Latino vs. Black) and by the exposure variable used in the negative binomial models. Neighborhoods with greater percentages of Black residents have significantly higher prison sentences as a function of filings but not of population. Latino concentration, by contrast, affects the number of prison, jail, and probation sentences per population but not per filings. Average prison sentence lengths are unaffected by neighborhood characteristics, and jail sentences are unrelated to any of the racial composition variables, while probation sentences vary inversely with the percentage of Black residents.
Neighborhood-level economic disadvantage appears to influence the overall rates of criminal punishment relative to the size of the population but not the rate of punishment as a function of the number of criminal case filings. This suggests that the “bad neighborhood” label may be more impactful on the likelihood that a person will be arrested and prosecuted than on predicting the final sentence rendered. The contamination may attenuate as one moves through the court process. This conclusion could also help explain the minimal impacts of area effects on sentence lengths. Importantly, though, the aggregate trends show that more arrests and prosecutions arising from troubled neighborhoods remain a source of racial disproportion in prosecution and sentencing. Additionally, the impact of having been arrested in a Black neighborhood may, in fact, be stronger in the sentencing stage. These findings suggest that researchers should tread carefully when analyzing outcomes at the sentencing stage without considering the processes leading up to that stage of the court process.
In “Complicating Race: Afrocentric Facial Feature Bias and Prison Sentencing in Oregon,” Amanda M. Petersen addresses the understudied matter of Black defendants’ facial feature stereotypicality. A small handful of previous studies have suggested the existence of a penalty for looking “more Black” as compared to possessing lighter skin and more Caucasian-like features. The theory, tied closely to the focal concerns perspective, is that Afrocentric features lend a defendant an aura of dangerousness and heightened culpability that (subconsciously) encourages judges and juries to hand down harsher sentences. The importance of this line of research is found in its focus on intraracial sentencing discrimination, in contrast to the majority of race research where interracial comparisons are the central feature.
Petersen offers a replication of prior studies conducted in a previously unused location (the state of Oregon) and extends the analysis to consider gender in addition to race. Data include the case files and photos of all Black females and a probability sample of Black males incarcerated in Oregon. Independent raters gauged the stereotypicality of the photos on a standardized scale, and Omori merged the ratings with the case data in order to determine how well stereoptypicality predicts sentence length. In contrast to previous research, the present findings show that Afrocentricity was unrelated to sentence length for both males and females once legally relevant case characteristics were controlled for.
The null results should not be taken as cause to dismiss Afrocentricity from consideration as a potential contributor to both individual and aggregate racial discrimination. As aforementioned, the sentencing decision is an unreliable indicator of the presence or absence of racial disproportionality. Curiously, Omori’s bivariate results show that male defendants’ Afrocentricity ratings correlate fairly robustly with the number of charges against them, which warrants multivariate elaboration. Afrocentric feature bias may infiltrate prosecutorial decision-making during the charge-filing stage or backward even further to police decisions. Researchers should continue parsing the impacts of the stereotypical image of (Afrocentric-looking) Black males on the behavior of police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and juries.
The article “Exploring the Relationship of Shared Race/Ethnicity with Court Actors, Perceptions of Court Procedural Justice, and Obligation to Obey Among Male Offenders,” by Thomas Baker, wraps up the special issue. This article contributes attitudinal data pertaining to court processes, thus complementing the other three articles utilizing official data to examine outcomes. Baker brings the theory of procedural justice to bear upon courts in an analysis of the predictors of perceived procedural justice and obligation to obey the law. In a twist on the standard analytical formula, Baker adds a variable tapping into whether the offender was the same race as his defense attorney, prosecutor, or judge. This is an instance in which one would hope to not find race effects and to instead learn that the perceived quality of court procedures is the driving force behind offenders’ beliefs that they were treated fairly.
Baker tests for shared race effects using survey data from prison inmates in Florida. Findings indicate that the only race impact on perceived procedural justice is among non-Whites who shared their race with the prosecutor. This result is interesting in light of the prosecutor being situated as the defendant’s adversary. Perhaps for defendants of color, shared race with the prosecutor instills a sense of comfort that the prosecutor will deliver fair, impartial treatment. When a defendant of color faces a White prosecutor, the power imbalance is doubled by the presence of both racial and authority-based asymmetry. This may diminish the perceived quality of treatment.
In the models predicting obligation to obey, procedural justice emerges as significantly increasing offenders’ beliefs that it is right to comply with the law, and shared race proves to not be an important predictor. This supports the notion that even defendants of color can be positively impacted by fair, transparent court processes. It is not inevitable that a minority defendant prosecuted, defended, and judged by Whites will see his or her treatment as unjust. This is not to undermine arguments for improving racial diversity among criminal court actors, but it does offer a glimmer of hope for the ability of a system—at this point still run predominantly by White authority figures with significant power over (mostly minority) defendants—to make defendants of color feel they received a fair process and unbiased outcome.
In total, the four articles featured in this special issue add significantly to the existing body of research on race in criminal courts. Each article answers important questions and offers avenues for future research. Light is shed on the nuance and complexity of racial disparity and discrimination, and the accumulative nature of disadvantage that makes each decision point (from arrest to charging to plea bargaining to sentencing) an opportunity for a small level of discrimination. As they compound, these small disparities at the individual-level snowball into massive, nation-level injustice. Hopefully, the articles presented in this issue will spur further scientific progress toward understanding and alleviating systemic racial disproportionality in the U.S. criminal court system.