Judges Treat Juveniles of the Same Race as Themselves More Harshly
A research study examining racial bias in juvenile court cases unveiled that judges have a higher rate of sending juveniles of their own race to jail and for longer sentences. This article details a conversation between NPR host, Steven Inskeep, NPR’s social science correspondent, Shankar Vedantam and Naci Mocan, an economist and scholar. Mocan completed this study analyzing thousands of cases in the Louisiana juvenile justice system between 1996 and 2012. When looking at cases where the defendant pleaded guilty, Mocan found that judges treated those of their own race with harsher penalties. A defendant facing a judge of their same race is about 20% more likely to be penalized with incarceration rather than probation. That defendant is also likely to receive a sentence that is 14% (3 months) longer than otherwise. One theory behind this is that people are more willing to punish someone from their “in-group” for breaking a norm. They find it easier to reason why someone from another group would not have followed this norm in the same way.
I'm not sure how to take this article. I have heard that this is a fact and does happen very often. It may be because people don't want to start any uprising by punishing another race different from the judge because they may get backlash for just doing it because they are different. I liked this article though and can see how this is extremely relevant in court cases today.
ReplyDelete