Ethnic inequalities in sentencing: Evidence from the crown court in England and Wales

In recent years, there has been considerable policy and academic interest in the existence of ethnic inequalities in the Criminal Justice System. A large body of sentencing research has been dedicated to exploring whether ethnic minority defendants are treated more harshly than similarly situated white defendants. This paper extends this research utilizing Ministry of Justice linked criminal justice datasets and multilevel models to assess the effect of ethnicity and other defendant case and contextual factors on sentencing outcomes in the Crown Court. The analysis shows that legal characteristics such as plea, pre-trial detention, offence type and severity are important factors determining sentencing outcomes although they do not fully explain disparities in these outcomes between ethnic groups. Ethnic disparities in imprisonment persist and, in some cases, become more pronounced after controlling for defendant case and court factors. In contrast, ethnic disparities in sentence length are largely explained by legal factors, and after adjusting for other predictors of sentencing outcomes, observed differences between most (but not all) ethnic minority groups and the white British disappear.