The Joint Effects of Offender Race/Ethnicity and Sexon Sentencing Outcomes

Abstract

Statistical data suggest that offender race/ethnicity and sex play important roles in criminal justice processing. Minority offenders and males, for example, are disproportionately overrepresented in U.S. prisons and jails. Specifically, based on the number of prison and jail inmates incarcerated in state facilities at mid-2005, Harrison and Beck (2006) estimated that rates of incarceration were five and one-half times higher for blacks and two times higher for Hispanics than they were for whites (p. 10). With regard to offender sex, at mid-2006, males constituted 92.8% of the U.S. prison population; they were 14 times more likely than women to be incarcerated (Sabol, Minton, & Harrison, June 2007, p. 5). Moreover, researchers estimate that a male has a 1 in 9 chance of going to prison in his lifetime, while a female has a 1 in 56 chance (Bonczar, 2003, p. 8).