Disparities in Sentencing

Ethnic Disparities in Sentencing in England and Wales

Review of Recent Findings

Under review at the Journal of Legal Research Methodology

Following the 2017 Lammy Review, research into ethnic disparities in sentencing in England and Wales has intensified. This article reviews the main findings from recent studies, focusing on the robustness of evidence, areas where disparities are most prevalent, gaps in the literature, and potential solutions. Ethnic disparities are less severe and more offence-specific than previously reported. There are no substantial differences in custodial sentence length, while for the probability of receiving a custodial sentence, disparities are concentrated primarily among drug offences. However, such disparities cannot be fully explained by statistical bias, suggesting a degree of sentencing discrimination. Sentencing disparities appear consistent across most minority groups. However, intersectional analyses reveal nuanced patterns; for instance, white male offenders require over 50% longer criminal records than black male offenders before crossing the custody threshold, while no significant differences are observed between black and white female offenders. Notably, socioeconomic factors, such as area deprivation, do not seem directly linked to ethnic disparities, although deprivation independently influences sentencing outcomes. Several gaps remain in the literature. Multivariate analyses focused on magistrates’ courts, where most sentences are imposed, are lacking. Qualitative research is also needed to explore disparities in areas like drug offences, male ethnic minority offenders, and assessments of mitigating factors. Current efforts to mitigate disparities should be expanded to include more structural solutions, such as increasing funding for legal aid, improving the quality of pre-sentence reports, and ensuring community services for addiction, mental health, and employment are accessible to ethnic minority groups.

Pina-Sánchez, J., & Guilfoyle, E. (2025). Ethnic Disparities in Sentencing in England and Wales: Review of Recent Findings. CrimRxiv. https://doi.org/10.21428/cb6ab371.86fb306c

Modelling Unwarranted Disparities in Sentencing

Distinguishing between Good and Bad Controls

Under review at the Journal of Quantitative Criminology

To minimise confounding bias and facilitate the identification of unwarranted disparities, sentencing researchers have traditionally sought to control for as many legal factors as possible. In this article we challenge such approach. Using causal graphs we show how controlling for commonly used variables in the sentencing literature can introduce bias. Instead, we propose a new modelling framework that clarifies which types of controls are necessary to identify different definitions of sentencing disparities. We apply this framework to the estimation of race disparities in the US federal courts and gender disparities in the England and Wales magistrates’ court. We find that the model uncertainty associated to the choice of controls is substantial for gender disparities and for race disparities affecting Hispanic offenders, rendering estimates of the latter inconclusive. Disparities against black offenders are more consistent, although, they are not strong enough to be seen as definitive evidence of racial discrimination.

Pina-Sánchez, J., Hamilton, M., & Tennant, P. W. (2024). Modelling unwarranted disparities in sentencing: Distinguishing between good and bad controls. Center for Open Science. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/ymzsv

Intersectional Disparities in Sentencing

An Application of MAIHDA to the US Federal Courts

Numerous studies emphasise the importance of adopting an intersectional perspective to examine unwarranted disparities in the criminal justice system. However, traditional methods, such as interaction effects, often result in overfitted models. Consequently, most studies focus on disparities across broad groups of offenders, neglecting the wider range of unique experiences that result from the intersection of multiple socio-demographic characteristics. Here, we use a new modelling approach, the multilevel analysis of individual heterogeneity and discriminant accuracy (MAIHDA), to explore the presence of intersectional disparities in sentencing that arise from the combination of offenders’ gender, race, level of education, and citizenship. Our findings indicate that these socio-demographic factors alone explain up to 19% of the variability in imprisonment decisions and 14% of the variability in sentence length within US Federal Courts. Additionally, we find that standard models ignoring intersectional disparities fail to account for up to 20% of the unwarranted disparities detected. These findings highlight the importance of placing intersectionality at the centre of the study of sentencing disparities and demonstrate the potential of MAIHDA to do so more comprehensively than previously possible.

Pina-Sánchez, J. and Tura, F. (2025). Intersectional disparities in sentencing: An application of MAIHDA to Federal Courts data. In: Welch, K., editor, Research Handbook on Race, Crime, and Justice. Edward Elgar

Testing the Interrelationship between Area Deprivation and Ethnic Disparities in Sentencing

In the examination of sentencing disparities, hypotheses related to social class have been relatively overlooked compared to explanations centered on offenders’ ethnicity. This oversight is regrettable as both factors often intertwine. In this study, we investigate the mediating and moderating effects between offenders’ residential area deprivation and their ethnic background using administrative data encompassing all offences processed through the England and Wales Crown Court. Our findings reveal the following: (i) substantial ethnic disparities among drug offenders, but mostly non-existent across other offence categories; (ii) area deprivation does not explain away the observed ethnic disparities, but pronounced area disparities are found for breach and assault offenses, wherein offenders living in deprived areas are penalized compared to their more affluent counterparts; and (iii) ethnicity and area deprivation interact, but only for breach offenses.

Pina‐Sánchez, J., Morales, A., Guilfoyle, E., Veiga, A., & Geneletti, S. (2025). Testing the interrelationship between area deprivation and ethnic disparities in sentencing. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 25(1), XX-XX. https://doi.org/10.1111/asap.12446

Racially Determined Case Characteristics

Exploring Disparities in the Use of Sentencing Factors in England and Wales

There is little understanding of how documented ethnic disparities in sentencing outcomes in England and Wales come to be and, consequently, how to address them. We argue that disparities in sentence outcomes could stem from how cases are constructed. We hypothesize that case characteristics determined through a high degree of judicial discretion and an assessment of the offender have a high risk of being racially determined, and therefore, operate as precursors of ethnic disparities in sentencing. We test this using Crown Court Sentencing Survey and Court Proceedings data. We identify three sentencing factors (remorse, good character and ability to rehabilitate) clearly favouring White offenders. We contextualize their operation and argue that all three should be classified as racially determined and sources of ethnic disparity. We conclude by setting out targeted policy solutions.

Guilfoyle, E., & Pina-Sánchez, J. (2024). Racially determined case characteristics: Exploring disparities in the use of sentencing factors in England and Wales. The British Journal of Criminology. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azae039

The Risk of Negative Feedback Loops in Some Weighted Measures of Crime Harm

Analyses of crime based upon aggregate counts of different crime types have restricted value, because they count all crime types equally irrespective of the harm caused. In response to this problem, a series of weighted measures of crime harm have been proposed. In this short contribution, we contend that the use of some crime harm metrics to inform police deployment practices has the potential to reinforce ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system through the creation of unintended negative feedback loops. We focus our analysis on the Cambridge Crime Harm Index and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Crime Severity Score, the preeminent crime harm indexes in England and Wales. We conclude that the ONS Crime Severity Score, which is based on mean sentencing outcomes, does give cause for concern in some contexts. There is currently no evidence that the Cambridge Crime Harm Index, based on sentencing guidelines, presents the same problems.

Lewis, S., Pina-Sánchez, J., and Birks, D. (2024). The risk of negative feedback loops in weighted measures of crime severity. Crime Science, 13(18):1–5. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40163-024-00216-8

Can Ethnic Disparities in Sentencing Be Taken as Evidence of Judicial Discrimination?

Large research efforts have been directed at the exploration of ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system, documenting harsher treatment of minority ethnic defendants, across offence types, criminal justice decisions, and jurisdictions. However, most studies on the topic have relied on observational data, which can only approximate ‘like with like’ comparisons. We use causal diagrams to lay out explicitly the different ways estimates of ethnic disparities in sentencing derived from observational data could be biased. Beyond the commonly acknowledged problem of unobserved case characteristics, we also discuss other less well-known, yet likely more consequential problems: measurement error in the form of racially-determined case characteristics or as a result of disparities within the ‘Whites’ reference group, and selection bias from non-response and missing offenders’ ethnicity data. We apply such causal framework to review findings from two recent studies showing ethnic disparities in custodial sentences imposed at the Crown Court (England and Wales). We also use simulations to recreate the most comprehensive of those studies, and demonstrate how the reported ethnic disparities appear robust to a problem of unobserved case characteristics. We conclude that ethnic disparities observed in the Crown Court are likely reflecting evidence of direct discrimination in sentencing.

Pina-Sánchez, J., Geneletti, S., Veiga, A., Morales, A., and Guilfoyle, E. (2024). Can ethnic disparities in sentencing be taken as evidence of judicial discrimination? Journal of Legal Research Methodology, 3(1):54–82 https://doi.org/10.19164/jlrm.v3i1.1394

Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Sentencing

What Do We Know, and Where Should We Go?

Strong evidence of racial and ethnic disparities has been documented in recent government-led reports, suggesting the presence of discrimination in sentencing, with Black and ethnic minority defendants being systematically sentenced more harshly than their white counterparts. However, we still do not know how these disparities come about as most of the sentencing research has relied on quantitative designs focused on documenting the problem, rather than exploring its causes. In this exploratory study we use qualitative interviews with criminal law barristers to explore the different mechanisms that may give rise to these disparities. From our interviews we identified two predominant causal mechanisms: the differential consideration of mitigating and aggravating factors and indirect discrimination arising from defendants’ socio-economic backgrounds and over-policing. Based on these findings, we suggest effective strategies such as explicitly listing social deprivation as a mitigating factor in the sentencing guidelines and increasing judicial diversity for redressing these disparities.

Veiga, A., Pina-Sánchez, J., and Lewis, S. (2023). Racial and ethnic disparities in sentencing: What do we know, and where should we go? The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 62(2):167–182 https://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12496

Does the Crown Court Discriminate Against Muslim-named Offenders?

A Novel Investigation Based on Text Mining Techniques


Most research in sentencing discrimination in the United Kingdom has relied on aggregate analyses comparing disparities by ethnic group. These studies fail to consider differences in the individual characteristics of the cases processed. To circumvent the lack of official data, we scraped sentence records stored in a commercial website, from which a sample of 8,437 offenders sentenced to custody in the Crown Court from 2007 to 2017 was generated. Using the names of the offenders, we have been able to classify 8.6 per cent of our sample as having a traditional Muslim name. We find that Muslim-named offenders received sentences 9.8 per cent longer than the rest of the sample. However, this difference disappeared once we accounted for the type of offence and other key case characteristics.

Pina-Sánchez, J., Roberts, J. V., and Sferopoulos, D. (2019). Does the Crown Court discriminate against Muslim-named offenders? A novel investigation based on text mining techniques. The British Journal of Criminology, 59(3):718–736. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azy062

Sentencing Gender?

Investigating the Extent and Origin of Sentencing Gender Disparities in the Crown Court

We explore the presence of gender sentencing disparities using large samples of assault, burglary and drugs offences from the Crown Court Sentencing Survey. We find significantly harsher sentences imposed on male offenders even after controlling for most case characteristics, including mitigating factors such as “caring responsibilities”. Specifically, the odds ratios of receiving a custodial sentence for offences of assault, burglary and drugs committed by a man as opposed to a woman are 2.84, 1.89 and 2.72. To put it in context, with the exception of “intent to commit serious harm”, the gender effect was stronger than any other “harm and culpability” factor applicable to assault offences. These disparities do not seem to stem primarily from differential interpretations of offender dangerousness. It is possible that they might be due to lower rates of reoffending amongst female offenders, or more probably to the higher punitive effect of custodial sentences on women. What seems clear is that sentencing is not gender neutral. If gender-specific sentencing guidelines are to be developed in the future it would be important that the noted disparities are taken in consideration.

Pina-Sánchez, J. and Harris, L. (2020). Sentencing Gender? Investigating the Extent and Origin of Sentencing Gender Disparities in the Crown Court. Criminal Law Review, 1:3–28