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Do Judges Have Tastes for Discrimination? Evidence from Criminal Courts

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  • Kyung H. Park

    (Wellesley College)

Abstract

Numerous studies find that criminal court judges issue racially disparate sentences, but whether these patterns reflect tastes for discrimination remains unclear. An alternative explanation is statistical discrimination, which implies that judges rely on race to predict a felon’s latent criminality in the absence of perfect information. This paper uses an empirical approach that distinguishes between taste-based and statistical discrimination. The intuition is that if the rank order of judicial incarceration rates depends on race, then this is symptomatic of taste-based discrimination. The rank-order test results imply that we cannot reject the null hypothesis of no taste-based discrimination.

Suggested Citation

  • Kyung H. Park, 2017. "Do Judges Have Tastes for Discrimination? Evidence from Criminal Courts," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 99(5), pages 810-823, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:99:y:2017:i:5:p:810-823
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    File URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00663
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    Cited by:

    1. Shumway, Clayson & Wilson, Riley, 2022. "Workplace disruptions, judge caseloads, and judge decisions: Evidence from SSA judicial corps retirements," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 205(C).
    2. Brendon McConnell & Imran Rasul, 2021. "Contagious Animosity in the Field: Evidence from the Federal Criminal Justice System," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 39(3), pages 739-785.

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