Discrimination in the Criminal Courts: Family, Gender, and the Problem of Equal Treatment

“Sex effects”—favoring women—typically found in criminal court pretrial release and sentencing outcomes have not been satisfactorily explained. Drawing on observational studies and interviews with court officials carried out by the author and others, a social control/social costs framework is presented. This framework revises Kruttschnitt's social control arguments and introduces the idea that there are social costs to punishment. Hypotheses are tested on the impact of a defendant's familial status and the interactive effects of gender and family for five court outcomes. The results show that initially significant sex effects are explained by defendants' familial situations. Implications are drawn for future research on gender discrimination in the criminal courts and for the problem of equal treatment of groups and individuals before the law.