Reassessing and Redirecting Research on Race and Sentencing*

A large portion of research on criminal sentencing over the past few decades has focused on the role of defendant race. The modal approach has encompassed regression-based studies of whether defendant race exerts a main effect on imprisonment decisions. Recent studies have employed more sophisticated statistical models, have incorporated information on both race and ethnicity, and have increasingly emphasized a possible conditional role of these defendant attributes on sentencing outcomes. While these enhancements have yielded some noteworthy insights into how race and ethnicity may shape sentencing decisions, there are notable conceptual and methodological problems inherent in the modal research strategy that limit its overall utility. This paper takes stock of what we have learned to date from standard approaches to studying race and sentencing, outlines what appear to be the major underlying themes that have motivated that research, and proposes some new research directions that may help us to address those themes in different and possibly more direct ways.