The Effects of the Offender’s Race, Ethnicity, and Sex on Federal Sentencing Outcomes in the Guidelines Era

Social scientists have conducted dozens of studies designed to untangle the relationship between race and sentence severity. In fact, this issue “may well have been the major research inquiry for studies of sentencing in the 1970s and early 1980s.” Many of these early studies focused on the direct effect of race on sentencing, asking whether black, and occasionally Hispanic, offenders were sentenced more harshly than white offenders. Recent research, however, has taken a more theoretically and methodologically sophisticated approach.