Direct and Organizational Discrimination in the Sentencing of Drug Offenders

• NCJ Number: 87812
• Journal: Social Problems Volume: 30 Issue: 2 Dated: (December 1982) Pages: 212-225
• Author(s): J D Unnever
• Date Published: 1982
• Length: 14 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Revised version presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Toronto, August 1981.

Annotation

Racial/ethnic discrimination and economic organizational discrimination were found in the sentencing of 313 convicted male drug offenders in Miami, Fla.

Abstract

Study data were collected in Miami between July 1 and December 31, 1971, under the auspices of the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse. The commission selected cases falling into four major drug categories: opiates, cocaine, dangerous drugs, and ancillary offenses. Direct discrimination was deemed to have occurred if the defendant's race/ethnicity or economic status influenced the judge's sentencing decision after controlling for the effects of the seriousness of the defendant's prior record and present drug offense, the type of lawyer retained by the defendant, and the outcome of the bail proceedings. Organizational discrimination was perceived to have occurred if the economically disadvantaged or minority defendant could not retain private attorneys or pretrial release and these failures resulted in more severe sentences. Deficiencies in the methods and statistics of prior research were corrected by (1) using logistic regression, which allows for simultaneous control of multiple categorical and continuous independent variables while modeling a binary dependent variable; (2) stringently controlling for the seriousness of the offense by doing a within-offense analysis and by simultaneously controlling for the within-offense-severity; and (3) testing for organizational discrimination. The study found that how the court allocated the type of attorney and the monetary nature of the pretrial release statuses discriminated in favor of the relatively economically advantaged drug offender. Further, the odds of incarceration for blacks were two and one-half times greater than the odds for whites. Although sentenced less severely than blacks, Hispanics were sentenced more severely than whites. Tabular data and 41 references are provided.