Race and Sentence Severity

The fact that race is related to the severity of punishment meted out by the American criminal justice system has been known for some time (see Piliavin and Briar, 1964; Ferdinand and Luchterhand, 1970; Thornberry, 1973; Carroll and Mondrick, 1976; Gibson, 1978; Uhlman, 1979; Petersilia, 1983; Terry, 1967; Black, 1970; Black and Reiss, 1970; Green, 1964; Hagan, 1974; Clarke and Koch, 1976; Hindelang, 1978). For example, although Blacks make up only about 12% of the American population, they make up about 48% of the American prison population (see Petersilia, 1983). However, what has been and still is under some dispute is whether or not race is merely correlated with these results or whether race causes these results. Defenders of the American criminal justice system maintain that the overrepresentation of Blacks in the prison population can be explained solely on the basis of the Black proportion of the arrestee population; Blacks constitute a disproportionate segment of the prison population because they commit a disproportionate number of serious crimes (see Blumstein, 1982). Even if we assume that the number of Black arrestees is strictly proportional to the number of Black criminals, a position very difficult to prove one way or the other, once