Executive Summary

This project examines racial and other disparities in the application of sentencing guidelines in Tennessee from 2015 to 2019. I examined 4 basic questions:

1. Are there racial disparities between the incarcerated population and the general population in Tennessee?
2. Are people of color receiving longer sentences on average for the same crimes?
3. Are there disparities in the application of sentence enhancements and sentence mitigation measures?
4. Is a person's sentence affected by whether they plead or go to trial?
   
   

Motivation

I worked as a paralegal for 10 years and have always been very interested in the criminal justice system. I am also passionate about racial justice and believe that the criminal justice system plays a substantial role in ongoing racial inequity in America.

Key Findings

1. Black and Hispanic Tennesseans are incarcerated at a rate of 3.5x that of white Tennesseeans.
2. Black defendants are 40% less likely than white defendants to receive sentence reductions, but twice as likely to receive designations that substantially lengthen their sentences.
3. Nonviolent drug sentences are 100+ years longer on average when Defendants insist on going to trial rather than pleading out. Many other nonviolent offenses also have large sentencing differentials between pleas and trials. This creates a strong incentive for nonviolent defendants (regardless of race) to plead out rather than pursue their constitutional right to a trial by jury.
   
   

Presentation

• Click here to view my full presentation
• Click here to see additional insights and visualizations
  
  

Cleaning, Coding, and Project Management

If you're interested:

• Here is my full analysis in Python
• Here is my kanban board for this project
• Here is the codebook for all available dimensions of this data
• Here is my spreadsheet of the 201 dimensions I selected to analyze and my categorizations of those dimensions
  
  

Data Sources

Census Reporter: https://censusreporter.org/profiles/04000US47-tennessee/

U.S. Sentencing Commission: https://www.ussc.gov/research/datafiles/commission-datafiles

Additional Resources

• Barkow, Rachel Elise. Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration. Harvard University Press, 2019.
• U.S. Sentencing Commission. “Inter-District Differences in Federal Sentencing Practices,” 2020.
• U.S. Sentencing Commission. “Demographic Differences in Sentencing,” 2017.
• The Sentencing Project. “State-by-State Data,” 2019.