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Date: April 20, 2024 Sat
Time: 3:36 am
Time: 3:36 am
Results for discretion
4 results foundAuthor: Baradaran, Shima Title: Race, Prediction & Discretion Summary: Many scholars and political leaders denounce racism as the cause of disproportionate incarceration of black Americans. All players in this system have been blamed including the legislators who enact laws that disproportionately harm blacks, police who unevenly arrest blacks, prosecutors who overcharge blacks, and judges that fail to release and oversentence black Americans. Some scholars have blamed the police and judges who make arrest and release decisions based on predictions of whether defendants will commit future crimes. They claim that prediction leads to minorities being treated unfairly. Others complain that racism results from misused discretion. This article explores where racial bias enters the criminal justice system through an empirical analysis that considers the impact of discretion and prediction. With a close look at the numbers and consideration of factors ignored by others, this article confirms some conventional wisdom but also makes several surprising findings. This article confirms what many commentators have suspected—that police arrest black defendants more often for drug crimes than white defendants. It also finds, contrary to popular belief, that there is little evidence to support the belief that drugs are linked to violent crime. Also, judges actually detain white defendants more than similarly-situated black defendants for all types of crimes. The important and surprising findings in this article challenge long-held conventions of race and help mitigate racial disparity in criminal justice. Details: Unpublished paper, 2012. 64p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed April 9, 2012 at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2035064 Year: 2012 Country: United States URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2035064 Shelf Number: 124888 Keywords: DiscretionPredictionRacial BiasRacial Disparities |
Author: Kuziemko, Ilyana Title: Should Prison Inmates be Released via Rules or Discretion? Summary: In 1980, nearly all state and federal prisoners were released via the discretion of a parole board, whereas today the majority are subject to rules-based regimes where the original sentence is binding. While opponents of parole have argued that boards are discriminatory or overly lenient, discretion might also have important benefits. If prison time lowers recidivism risk and if parole boards can accurately estimate inmates' risk, then, relative to a rules-based regime where sentences are binding, discretion produces allocative-efficiency benefits (costly prison space is allocated to the highest-risk offenders) and incentive bene ts (prisoners know they must reduce their recidivism risk to gain an early release, so invest in their own rehabilitation). Exploiting quasi-experiments from the state of Georgia, I show that prison time reduces recidivism risk and that parole boards set prison time in an allocatively efficient manner. Prisoners respond to these incentives -- after a reform that limited parole for certain offenders, they accumulated a greater number of disciplinary infractions, completed fewer prison rehabilitative programs, and recidivated at higher rates than inmates unaffected by the reform. I estimate that eliminating parole increases the prison population by ten percent while simultaneously increasing the crime rate through deleterious effects on recidivism. Details: Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2011. 54p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed August 3, 2012 at: http://www.princeton.edu/~kuziemko/parole_29oct2011.pdf Year: 2011 Country: United States URL: http://www.princeton.edu/~kuziemko/parole_29oct2011.pdf Shelf Number: 125854 Keywords: DiscretionEarly ReleaseParoleParole BoardsRecidivism |
Author: Starr, Sonja B. Title: Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases Summary: This paper assesses gender disparities in federal criminal cases. It finds large gender gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution (averaging over 60%), conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Female arrestees are also significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted. Prior studies have reported much smaller sentence gaps because they have ignored the role of charging, plea-bargaining, and sentencing fact-finding in producing sentences. Most studies control for endogenous severity measures that result from these earlier discretionary processes and use samples that have been winnowed by them. I avoid these problems by using a linked dataset tracing cases from arrest through sentencing. Using decomposition methods, I show that most sentence disparity arises from decisions at the earlier stages, and use the rich data to investigate causal theories for these gender gaps. Details: East Lansing, MI: University of Michigan Law School, 2012. 41p. Source: Internet Resource: University of Michigan Law and Economics Research Paper, No. 12-018: Accessed September 27, 2012 at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2144002 Year: 2012 Country: United States URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2144002 Shelf Number: 126473 Keywords: DiscretionDiscriminationGenderPunishmentSentencing Disparities |
Author: Weber, Leanne Title: Deciding to Detain: How Decisions to Detain Asylum Seekers are Made at Ports of Entry Summary: This research report is based on interviews conducted with immigration officers stationed at international air, sea and train ports in the UK in the late 1990s. It contains extensive first person quotes from immigration officers describing the factors that influence their discretionary decisions to detain asylum seekers on arrival. Both legal and extra-legal factors were found to influence these decisions. Moreover, statements made by immigration officials called into question claims made by departmental management at the time that detention on arrival was being used only as a last resort. Details: Cambridge, UK: Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, 2014. 136p. Source: Internet Resource: Criminal Justice, Borders and Citizenship Research Paper: Accessed September 5, 2015 at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2520382 Year: 2014 Country: United Kingdom URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2520382 Shelf Number: 136701 Keywords: Asylum SeekersBorder ControlDecision-MakingDiscretionImmigrant DetentionImmigration Enforcement |