RT Article
T1 Racial Bias in Criminal Records
JF Journal of quantitative criminology
VO 40
IS 3
SP 489
OP 531
A1 Grunwald, Ben
LA English
YR 2024
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1916836224
AB ObjectivesGovernment officials use criminal records as proxies for past conduct to decide who and how to investigate, arrest, charge, and punish. But those records may be racially biased measures of individual behavior. This paper develops a theoretical definition of bias in criminal records in terms of measurement error. It then seeks to provide empirical estimates of racial bias in official arrest records for a broad swath of offenses.MethodI use official arrest and self-reported crime data from the Pathways to Desistance study to estimate Black-to-white and Hispanic-to-white crime ratios conditional on arrest. I also develop a novel, theory-based empirical test of differential reporting across racial and ethnic groups.ResultsCompared to white subjects with the same number of arrests, I estimate that Black subjects committed 53, 30, 23, and 56% fewer property, violent, drug, and DUI offenses, respectively, and that Hispanic subjects committed 19 and 46% fewer drug and DUI offenses. The analysis finds relatively little evidence of differential reporting that would bias my estimates upwards, with the possible exception of drug trafficking offenses.ConclusionThe results provide evidence that Pathways subjects’ arrest records are racially biased measures of their past criminal behavior, which could bias decisions of criminal justice officials and risk assessment algorithms that are based on arrest records.
K1 Algorithmic fairness
K1 Differential reporting
K1 racial bias
K1 Criminal records
DO 10.1007/s10940-023-09575-y