By Washington State Statistical Analysis Center

This project seeks to discover whether exclusionary discipline and later criminal justice system involvement are associated, and to determine whether race, sex, and homelessness are confounding factors. The Washington Statistical Analysis Center (SAC) applied for and received the 2018 State Justice Statistics Grant from BJS. Among other projects, the SAC sought the grant to evaluate the connection between a student’s exclusionary discipline and their future justice system involvement in Washington. This evaluation connects data from schools and the courts to assess the strength of this relationship and examine the influence of other factors (such as race, sex, and homelessness). Here are some of the main takeaways from this report: • Students identified as male were more than two times as likely to be associated with postgraduate convictions as compared to their female counterpart. • Students with any homelessness were 1.7 times as likely to be associated with a post graduate conviction than student with no record of homelessness. • Students identified as American Indian or Alaskan Native were more than two times more likely to have a post-graduate conviction than students identified as other races • Students identified as Black/African American had at least one exclusionary discipline event (25.1%) at nearly twice the proportion of the cohort average (13.6%), with students identified as American Indian/Alaskan Native and Hispanic/Latino not far behind. • Results should be interpreted with caution. 

Olympia, WA: Washington STate Statistical Analysis Center, 2022. 11p.

By Hedwig Lee

I describe how cultural and structural racism operate the entire contemporary American criminal justice system via five features: devaluation of certain human lives, ubiquitous adaptation, networked structure, perceived neutrality, and temporal amnesia. I draw from specific historical and contemporary examples in policing, courts, and corrections to further emphasize the foundational nature of racism and its role in shaping racial/ethnic inequities not just in relationship to criminal justice outcomes but also in relationship to health, economic, and social well-being.

Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 7, Page 233 - 255

By John W. Wertheimer

This first title in the “Law, Literature & Culture” series uses six legal disputes from the South Carolina courts to illuminate the complex legal history of race in the U.S. South from slavery through Jim Crow. The first two cases—one criminal, one civil—both illuminate the extreme oppressiveness of slavery. The third explores labor relations between newly emancipated Black agricultural workers and white landowners during Reconstruction. The remaining cases investigate three prominent features of the Jim Crow system: segregated schools, racially biased juries, and lynching, respectively. Throughout the century under consideration, South Carolina’s legal system obsessively drew racial lines, always to the detriment of non-white people, but it occasionally provided a public forum within which racial oppression could be challenged. The book emphasizes how dramatically the degree of legal oppressiveness experienced by Black South Carolinians varied during the century under study, based largely on the degree of Black access to political and legal power.

Amherst College Press, 2023.

By Stacey J. Bosick

An analysis of felony cases accepted for prosecution by the Denver District Attorney’s Office in the City and County of Denver REPORT HIGHLIGHTS: • The researcher found racial and ethnic differences across three of the four points of prosecutorial discretion examined: dismissals, deferred judgments, and referrals to drug court. • There was no evidence of racial and ethnic differences in plea offers, the fourth point of prosecutorial discretion examined. • Results of the study demonstrate a persistent set of disadvantages faced by Black and Hispanic defendants. • The findings point to the importance of increasing structures and processes to support racial justice, including collecting and examining data across multiple points of prosecutorial discretion.

Denver: University of Denver, 2021. 44p.

By David Arnold, Will Dobbie, and Peter Hull

 We develop new quasi-experimental tools to measure racial discrimination, due to either racial bias or statistical discrimination, in the context of bail decisions. We show that the omitted variables bias in observational release rate comparisons can be purged by using the quasi-random assignment of judges to estimate average race-specific misconduct risk. We find that approximately two-thirds of the average release rate disparity between white and Black defendants in New York City is due to racial discrimination. We then develop a hierarchical marginal treatment effects model to study the drivers of discrimination, finding evidence of both racial bias and statistical discrimination. Outcome-based tests of racial bias therefore omit an important source of racial discrimination in bail decisions, and cannot be used to rule out all possible violations of U.S. anti-discrimination law.   

Chicago: University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, Working Paper, 2020. 83p.