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.

Keay, Inwood, and Long on Institutional Change and Criminal Sentencing on the Frontier: Evidence from British Columbia's Jails, 1864-1913 @kris_inwood

Ian Keay, Queen's University, Department of Economics, Kris Inwood, University of Guelph, Department of Economics, and Blair Long, Cape Breton University have published Institutional Change and Criminal Sentencing on the Frontier: Evidence from British Columbia's Jails, 1864-1913. Here is the abstract.

In this paper we document the effect of transformative institutional change on criminal sentencing in a frontier environment. New historical evidence digitized from British Columbia’s (BC) prison admission ledgers allows us to track changes in sentencing distributions from 1864 to 1913. We find that as BC's criminal justice system moved from informal and locally independent colonial institutions, toward a set of institutions that closely resemble the system in place today, average sentences got longer and sentence dispersion fell. We isolate the increase in sentence length and decrease in sentence dispersion that can be attributed to changes in judicial decision-making by controlling for changes in the observable characteristics of the province's prison population. We also show that changes in the sentencing distribution were coincident with a reduction in judicial discretion, an increase in sentence predictability, and an expansion in the criminal justice system along the extensive margin.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Tucker on When Wage Theft Was a Crime in Canada, 1935-1955

Eric Tucker, York University, Osgoode Hall Law School; Cleveland-Marshall College of Law (Visiting), is publishing When Wage Theft Was a Crime in Canada, 1935-1955 in volume 54 of Osgoode Hall Law Journal. Here is the abstract.

In recent years the term “wage theft” has been widely used to describe the phenomenon of employers not paying their workers the wages they are owed. While the term has great normative weight, it is rarely accompanied by calls for employers literally to be prosecuted under the criminal law. However, it is a little known fact that in 1935 Canada enacted a criminal wage theft law, which remained on the books until 1955. This article provides an historical account of history of the wage theft law, including the role of the Royal Commission on Price Spreads, the legislative debates and amendments that narrowed its scope and the one unsuccessful effort to prosecute an employer for intentionally paying less than the provincial minimum wage. It concludes that the law was a symbolic gesture and another example of the difficulty of using the criminal law to punish employers for their wrongdoing.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.