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Discrimination In Sentencing On The Basis Of Afrocentric Features, William T. Pizzi, Irene V. Blair, Charles M. Judd
Discrimination In Sentencing On The Basis Of Afrocentric Features, William T. Pizzi, Irene V. Blair, Charles M. Judd
Publications
For a long time, social scientists have worried about possible racial discrimination in sentencing in the United States. With a prison population that exceeds two million inmates of whom approximately 48% are African American, the worry over the fairness of the sentencing process is understandable. This article is not about discrimination between racial categories as such, but about a related form of discrimination, namely, discrimination on the basis of a person's Afro-centric features. Section I of the article describes a line of social science research that shows that a person's Afro-centric features have a strong biasing effect on judgment such …
Sentencing Decisions: Matching The Decisionmaker To The Decision Nature, Paul H. Robinson, Barbara A. Spellman
Sentencing Decisions: Matching The Decisionmaker To The Decision Nature, Paul H. Robinson, Barbara A. Spellman
All Faculty Scholarship
The present sentencing debate focuses on which decisionmaker is best suited to make the sentencing decision. Competing positions in this debate typically view the sentencing decision as monolithic, preferring one decisionmaker over all the others. A monolithic view of the decision unnecessarily invites poor decisionmaking. The sentencing decision is properly viewed as a series of distinct decisions, each of which can best be performed by a decisionmaker with certain qualities. This Essay demonstrates how a system of optimal decisionmaking might be constructed -by sorting out the different attributes called for by the distinct aspects of the sentencing decision and matching …