Equality Before the Courts? Studying Citizenship Disparities in Sentencing in Catalonia

Abstract

Overrepresentation of foreigners in prisons is a well-established fact in Spain. However, there is a lack of empirical studies exploring the causes of this overrepresentation. Based on focal concerns theory, this paper aims to explore one of the possible causes of this overrepresentation: sentencing disparities between Spanish and foreign citizens. For this purpose, two subsets of court records are used to study disparities in the odds of incarceration (n = 2310) and differences in the length of prison sentence (n = 1162). Due to alleged limitations of standard regression models to analyse disparities in sentencing when differences between groups are large, entropy re-weighting was used to achieve balance between group observations with regard to control variables. The analyses reveal, on the one hand that, even when controlling for relevant legal and other extra-legal factors, citizens from Africa have higher odds than Spanish citizens to be sentenced to prison. On the other hand, no differences in the length of the conviction have been found.