NCJ Number
206115
Journal
Criminology Volume: 42 Issue: 2 Dated: May 2004 Pages: 417-456
Date Published
May 2004
Length
40 pages
Annotation
This study examined bilevel disparities in court dispositions for inmate assault.
Abstract
This study presents analyses of disparities in case processing for 2,948 males arrested for misdemeanor assaults on inmates in Hamilton County, OH. Aside from providing new insight into the magnitude of disparate treatment in such cases, the study offers two important contributions to the larger literature. First, disparities are examined at multiple stages including formal charging, full prosecution, conviction, and sentencing, thus providing a relatively rare examination of the prevalence of disparities throughout a court system. Second, the data permit comparisons of disparities based on the socioeconomic status of defendants versus that of their neighborhoods. The study argues that the relevance of neighborhood characteristics can be framed within existing perspectives. A focus on neighborhood level disparities was also consistent with an argument extrapolated from the literature on court communities regarding court actors’ considerations of ecological contexts in which large-volume crimes occur. Therefore, larger concentrations of minorities in more poverty stricken environments are not likely to feed elite’s perceptions of threat to economic power. The difference in the level of aggregation between studies necessarily prohibits a valid comparison of results for cross-level interactions. Tables, references