• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

information for practice

news, new scholarship & more from around the world


advanced search
  • gary.holden@nyu.edu
  • @ Info4Practice
  • Archive
  • About
  • Help
  • Browse Key Journals
  • RSS Feeds

Racial Bias in Bail Decisions*

Abstract

This paper develops a new test for identifying racial bias in the context of bail decisions—a high-stakes setting with large disparities between white and black defendants. We motivate our analysis using Becker’s model of racial bias, which predicts that rates of pretrial misconduct will be identical for marginal white and marginal black defendants if bail judges are racially unbiased. In contrast, marginal white defendants will have higher rates of misconduct than marginal black defendants if bail judges are racially biased, whether that bias is driven by racial animus, inaccurate racial stereotypes, or any other form of bias. To test the model, we use the release tendencies of quasi-randomly assigned bail judges to identify the relevant race-specific misconduct rates. Estimates from Miami and Philadelphia show that bail judges are racially biased against black defendants, with substantially more racial bias among both inexperienced and part-time judges. We find suggestive evidence that this racial bias is driven by bail judges relying on inaccurate stereotypes that exaggerate the relative danger of releasing black defendants.

Read the full article ›

Posted in: Journal Article Abstracts on 05/31/2018 | Link to this post on IFP |
Share

Primary Sidebar

Categories

Category RSS Feeds

  • Calls & Consultations
  • Clinical Trials
  • Funding
  • Grey Literature
  • Guidelines Plus
  • History
  • Infographics
  • Journal Article Abstracts
  • Meta-analyses - Systematic Reviews
  • Monographs & Edited Collections
  • News
  • Open Access Journal Articles
  • Podcasts
  • Video

© 1993-2023 Dr. Gary Holden. All rights reserved.

gary.holden@nyu.edu
@Info4Practice