Racial Bias in Bail Decisions / David Arnold, Will Dobbie, Crystal S. Yang.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Arnold, David.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Dobbie, Will.

Yang, Crystal S.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w23421.

NBER working paper series no. w23421

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2017.

Summary:

This paper develops a new test for identifying racial bias in the context of bail decisions - a high-stakes setting with large disparities between white and black defendants. We motivate our analysis using Becker's (1957) model of racial bias, which predicts that rates of pre-trial misconduct will be identical for marginal white and marginal black defendants if bail judges are racially unbiased. In contrast, marginal white defendants will have a higher probability of misconduct than marginal black defendants if bail judges are racially biased against blacks. To test the model, we develop a new estimator that uses the release tendencies of quasi-randomly assigned bail judges to identify the relevant race-specific misconduct rates. Estimates from Miami and Philadelphia show that bail judges are racially biased against black defendants, with substantially more racial bias among both inexperienced and part-time judges. We also find that both black and white judges are biased against black defendants. We argue that these results are consistent with bail judges making racially biased prediction errors, rather than being racially prejudiced per se.

Notes:

Print version record

May 2017.