How Do Judges Decide? by Cassia Spohn

Author:Cassia Spohn [Spohn, Cassia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Law, Courts, Criminal Law, General, Criminal Procedure, Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9781412961042
Google: XNWg9wrVtY0C
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2009-01-15T05:37:07+00:00

SOURCE: From U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics (2007e, appendix table 7).

The crimes for which members of racial minorities and whites are imprisoned also differ. Although the proportions held in state prisons in 2004 for violent offenses were similar, blacks and Hispanics were much more likely than whites to be imprisoned for drug offenses. Twenty-three percent of the blacks and 21.4 percent of the Hispanics were imprisoned for drug offenses, compared with only 14.8 percent of the whites (U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics 2007e). Drug offenses also constituted a somewhat larger share of the growth in state prison inmates for blacks than for whites. From 1995 to 2001, drug offenders accounted for 22.9 percent of the total growth among black inmates and 17.9 percent of the total growth of white inmates (U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics 2003b).

As these statistics indicate, blacks and Hispanics, particularly black and Hispanic males, are substantially more likely than whites to be locked up in our nation’s prisons. These statistics suggest that state and federal judges sentence a disproportionately high number of racial minorities to prison or that racial minorities are sentenced to serve longer terms than whites. The question, of course, is why this occurs.

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