RT Article
T1 Does the crown court discriminate against muslim-named offenders?: a novel investigation based on text mining techniques
JF The British journal of criminology
VO 59
IS 3
SP 718
OP 736
A1 Pina-Sánchez, Jose
A2 Roberts, Julian V.
A2 Sferopoulos, Dimitrios
LA English
YR 2019
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1664853235
AB 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.
K1 Sentencing
K1 Discrimination
K1 Muslim,
K1 Crown Court,
K1 Data scraping
DO 10.1093/bjc/azy062