The influence of racial threat and intergroup contact on the incarceration of black drug defendants

The effect of racial threat on racial disparities in sentencing has yielded inconsistent findings. One explanation involves the widespread use of the percentage of the Black population to measure racial threat, which assumes that decision-makers respond to general demographic patterns. However, it is more plausible that prosecutors are influenced by the racial composition of their specific caseloads. A multilevel analysis using the percent of Black drug defendants, rather than an overall racial composition population measure, fails to support racial threat theory or the contact hypothesis. Nonetheless, Black drug defendants remain significantly more likely than similarly situated White defendants to receive incarcerative sentences, indicating that racial disparities persist even when alternative threat measures are used when examining large urban U.S. counties.