Keay, Inwood, and Long on Public Sentiment and Criminal Sentencing: Gender, Indigeneity, and Class in Nineteenth Century British Columbia

Ian Keay, Department of Economics, Queen's University, Kris Inwood, University of Guelph, Department of Economics, and Blair Long, Memorial University, have published Public Sentiment and Criminal Sentencing: Gender, Indigeneity, and Class in Nineteenth Century British Columbia . Here is the abstract.

Using prison admission ledgers, we document the criminal sentencing behaviour of judges through an institutionally transformative period in the history of the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC). Between 1864 and 1913 we find significant biases in sentencing that resulted in shorter sentences for Indigenous, Chinese-origin, and female prisoners, relative to prisoners with otherwise similar observable characteristics. In contrast, prisoners who reported occupations typically held by those in the lowest and highest social classes had relatively longer sentences than the average prisoner. Over time, these biases shifted for those of Indigenous and Chinese-origin, and for women, concurrent with changes in public sentiment and significant historical and institutional events in BC. We use the probability of each prisoner's predicted future recidivism to test for the presence and impact of statistical discrimination. We find evidence of significant statistical bias, but the effect on prisoners' sentences is small, and most of the differential sentencing we document can be attributed to some combination of judge's taste-based discriminatory attitudes, and statistical discrimination along other dimensions.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.