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 r...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Pina-Sánchez, Jose (Author)
Contributors: Roberts, Julian V. ; Sferopoulos, Dimitrios
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Published: 2019
In: The British journal of criminology
Year: 2019, Volume: 59, Issue: 3, Pages: 718-736
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
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Keywords:
Sentencing
Discrimination
Muslim,
Crown Court,
Data scraping
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:1464-3529
DOI:10.1093/bjc/azy062