Tag: Discrimination

Must-See: Imran Rasul and Brendon McConnell: Ethnic Sentencing Differentials in the Federal Criminal Justice System

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-See: More evidence that the federal judicial system needs more wise Latinas on the bench…

Imran Rasul and Brendon McConnell: Ethnic Sentencing Differentials in the Federal Criminal Justice System: “Wed, May 4: 4:00 PM: In the Federal criminal justice system…

…large differences in sentencing outcomes exist between minority and White defendants…. [Does] unobserved heterogeneity of defendants, correlated to their ethnicity, drive these differentials[?] We… estimat[e]… bounds on treatment effects of ethnicity…. Black-White judicial sentencing differentials are not robust to accounting for unobserved heterogeneity across defendants. Hispanic-White differentials are robust along multiple sentencing margins. A candidate explanation is ingroup bias causing outsiders' (Hispanics) to be treated differently toinsiders’ (Whites and Blacks). We test this explanation by exploiting 9-11 as an exogenously timed cue heightening the salience of insider-outsider differences…. Among those sentenced post 9-11, Hispanic-White judicial sentencing differentials are further exacerbated. Decomposition analysis shows that only 7% of the DiD Hispanic-White gap is attributable to observables…. We find evidence for prosecutor’s ingroup biases in setting initial offense charges…. In districts with a higher proportion of Hispanic judges, the Hispanic-White sentencing differential is significantly reduced, consistent with judges’ ingroup biases driving their sentencing decisions…

Must-Read: Rajiv Sethi: Threats Perceived When There Are None

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Mark Thoma sends us to Rajiv Sethi, who makes a convincing case that the very sharp Sendhil Mullainathan has gotten one wrong here:

Rajiv Sethi: Threats Perceived When There Are None: “He argues that ‘eliminating the biases of all police officers would do little…

…to materially reduce the total number of African-American killings…. 28.9 percent of arrestees were African-American… not very different from the 31.8 percent of police-shooting victims…. If police discrimination were a big factor in the actual killings, we would have expected a larger gap between the arrest rate and the police-killing rate….
 
A key assumption… is that encounters involving genuine (as opposed to perceived) threats to officer safety arise with equal frequency across groups…. A safe encounter might well be perceived as risky, as the following example of a traffic stop for a seat belt violation in South Carolina…. Sendhil is implicitly assuming that a white motorist who behaved in exactly the same manner as Levar Jones did in the above video would have been treated in… the same manner by the officer…. Think of the encounter involving Henry Louis Gates and Officer James Crowley back in 2009… a safe encounter… [that] may not have happened in the first place had Gates been white. If the very high incidence of encounters between police and black men is due… to encounters that ought not to have… a disproportionate share… will be safe, and one ought to expect fewer killings per encounter in the [presence of bias toward having an encounter and the] absence of bias [once the encounter begins]. Observing parity would then be suggestive of bias…. In justifying the termination of the officer in the video above, the director of the South Carolina Department of Public Safety stated that he ‘reacted to a perceived threat where there was none.’  Fear is a powerful motivator… even when there are strong incentives not to shoot…