Jello Biafra wrote:Tahar Joblis wrote:Mind you, we may be able to "explain" some small portion of the gap using cooperativeness (specifically for drug charges only, according to the data in that paper) but that doesn't mean that sexism isn't at play.
If I look at salaries of teachers in 1950-1960, a significant portion of the gender pay gap can be successfully explained using marital status. However, that explanation involves identifiable discrimination - formal or informal "marriage bars" that meant that it was much harder to get hired (or retained) as a married woman.
I rather suspect that in any cases where we find that increased cooperativeness explains some portion of the sentencing gap, we will find something along the lines of other identifiable effects like the "girlfriend effect," or the net effect on gender sentencing balance of insanity pleas: Women's cooperativeness is recognized as a reason for a sentencing discount more often than men's cooperativeness is, rather than being more frequently present.
The fact that women are treated more leniently in the criminal justice system1 is something that has been recognized for a very long time. It's mentioned in the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments coming out of the Seneca Falls Convention, which is more or less the original founding document of the feminist movement within the United States. As Galloism has mentioned by way of comparison above (and as I have mentioned numerous times), the pattern is similar to racial discrimination within the criminal justice system, and no less quantifiably visible.
There are indicators of the size of the offense-arrest step that point to it being no less important than anything else, but it's much harder to pull together, because you have to compare two very different types of data with very different collection methodologies - incidence prevalence surveys independent from the criminal justice system with arrest rates by the criminal justice system.
From this survey, you may note that blacks use illicit drugs somewhere around 10-20% more often than whites, and men use illicit drugs somewhere around 50% more than women.
Consulting the arrest figures, however, men are four times as likely to be arrested for drug use/possession, and blacks are about 2.5 times as likely to be arrested for drug use / possession. A man who uses drugs is on the order of 2-3 times as likely to be arrested for the offense as a woman who uses drugs; and a black person who uses drugs are on the order of 2-2.5 times as likely to be arrested for the offense as a white person who uses drugs.
Another example of a subject where we have prevalence surveys is domestic violence; and from that we know that, conditioning on offending behavior, men are far more likely to be arrested / charged than women for the same offense (varies significantly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but 2-3 times as likely is typical).
On the epidemiological level, it's quite clear that women and whites, have baseline offense rates that are closer, respectively, to men and blacks than arrest rates indicate.
EDIT: As an addendum for anyone suggesting that men abuse drugs in a fashion more than 1.5x as severe as women, I will point to the fact that the death rate ratio is 1.55:1 and the ER visit ratio is 1.35:1. The epidemiology of drug use is understood to impact men more severely for various reasons - probably including lower rates of use of medical and particularly psychiatric / psychological services - but not four times as severely.
1. At least in the Anglosphere, and almost certainly in the whole of the modern West. I would be hesitant to try to extend Western data to, say, Saudi Arabia without looking for specific indicators.
Certainly. There may be non-discriminatory factors in addition to discriminatory factors, or maybe discriminatory factors that are (semi-)disguised as non-discriminatory factors.
There is no "maybe" about it. Men, and blacks, are more likely to be arrested in situations where women, and whites, would receive the benefit of the doubt and not wind up arrested or charged.
It's clearly true for drug offenses compared to drug use, as shown above. Domestic violence offenses as opposed to acts of domestic violence (for the black-white side of this, compare and contrast race coded items on DV prevalence surveys, e.g., 4.3-4.4 here, with arrest rates). Traffic offenses as opposed to actual traffic law violations.
And yes, this powerful discriminatory effects are being masked by those either explicitly claiming - with no independent evidence, mind you - that the difference in arrests is explained by the difference in crime rates, or using those arrest rates as evidence for a large difference in crime rates.
In the grand scheme of things, pointing to arrest rates to claim higher rates of criminal activity in order to claim non-discriminatory behavior by arresting parties is a circular argument to start with, but we're not simply dealing with a lack of evidence here. All available evidence that could test whether or not police discriminate against men, and blacks, in who they choose to arrest or issue citations to points towards discriminatory behavior.
