FACIAL PROFILING: RACE, PHYSICAL APPEARANCE, AND PUNISHMENT*

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12143
• Author: BRIAN D. JOHNSON,RYAN D. KING
• Date: 01 August 2017
• Published date: 01 August 2017

FACIAL PROFILING: RACE, PHYSICAL

APPEARANCE, AND PUNISHMENT∗

BRIAN D. JOHNSON1and RYAN D. KING2

1Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of

Maryland—College Park

2Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University

KEYWORDS: race, appearance, stereotypes, disparity, sentencing, punishment

We investigate the associations among physical appearance, threat perceptions, and

criminal punishment. Psychological ideas about impression formation are integrated

with criminological perspectives on sentencing to generate and test unique hypotheses

about the associations among defendant facial characteristics, subjective evaluations of

threatening appearance, and judicial imprisonment decisions. We analyze newly col-

lected data that link booking photos, criminal histories, and sentencing information for

more than 1,100 convicted felony defendants. Our findings indicate that Black defen-

dants are perceived to be more threatening in appearance. Other facial characteristics,

such as physical attractiveness, baby-faced appearance, facial scars, and visible tattoos,

also influence perceptions of threat, as do criminal history scores. Furthermore, some

physical appearance characteristics are significantly related to imprisonment decisions,

even after controlling for other relevant case characteristics. These and other findings

are discussed as they relate to psychological research on impression formation, crimi-

nological theories of court actor decision-making, and sociological work on race and

punishment.

Social scientists have long studied how physical appearance shapes individual life

outcomes. For instance, economists have examined the ways that attractiveness influ-

ences earnings (Hamermesh and Biddle, 1994), sociologists have studied how facial

features impact status attainment (Mueller and Mazur, 1996), and psychologists have

demonstrated that political candidates who look more trustworthy are more likely to

be elected (Todorov et al., 2005). The findings from this body of work demonstrate that

people routinely make character judgments based on physical appearance and that these

judgments are consequential for individual life outcomes. Nevertheless, little scholarship

has been conducted that considers the ways that physical appearance, other than race

and ethnicity, shape decision-making in the criminal justice system.

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online

Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2017.55.issue-3/issuetoc.

This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES-1228003). We

thank Colin Gruner, Christopher Rees, Rebecca Richardson, and Anat Kimchi for their research

assistance.

Direct correspondence to Brian D. Johnson, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice,

University of Maryland, 2220K LeFrak Hall, 7251 Preinkert Drive, College Park, MD 20742 (e-

mail: bjohnso2@umd.edu).

C2017 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12143

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 55 Number 3 520–547 2017 520

FACIAL PROFILING 521

We investigate this issue by examining the empirical associations among criminal

defendants’ facial characteristics, perceptions of threatening appearance, and judicial

sentencing decisions. By using a unique data set that combines booking photographs with

sentencing information, we contribute to punishment research in several ways. First, we

integrate psychological ideas on impression formation with contemporary perspectives

on criminal sentencing. Psychologists argue that people routinely use facial features to

infer information about the inner character of others (Langlois et al., 2000; Webster and

Driskell, 1983; Zebrowitz, 1997), and sentencing theories stress the salience of perceptual

stereotypes that influence court actor decision-making (Albonetti, 1991; Steffensmeier,

Ulmer, and Kramer, 1998). By integrating ideas from these disparate literatures, we

identify possible ways that defendants’ physical appearance can affect their treatment

in the courtroom. Second, we contribute to sociological work on racial stereotypes and

criminal punishment by investigating associations between defendant race and subjective

perceptions of criminal threat. Although these associations are commonly invoked by

researchers in sentencing research (Bridges and Steen, 1998; Steffensmeier and Demuth,

2000), rarely are data available to test them empirically. Third, we expand the ken of

research on social inequalities in punishment by examining sentencing disparities that

are associated not only with the race of the defendant but also with other physical

appearance characteristics. We examine subjective factors, like defendant attractiveness,

along with more tangible and less subjective qualities, such as the presence of visible

tattoos.

To investigate these issues, we focus on three interrelated research questions: First,

are defendant race and physical qualities related to subjective perceptions of threatening

appearance within a sample of convicted offenders? Second, are physical appearance

characteristics, including race and ethnicity, associated with imprisonment decisions in

felony cases net of legally relevant sentencing factors? And third, are any of the direct

effects of facial appearance mediated by subjective impressions of criminal threat in

sentencing? To answer these questions, we analyze unique data that were collected with

the purpose of studying defendant appearance and sentencing. We link the booking pho-

tographs of more than 1,100 convicted offenders with official sentencing records and use

a team of researchers to rate each photograph along various dimensions of appearance

to investigate the association between physical appearance traits and criminal sentencing

outcomes.

We begin by reviewing psychological perspectives on physical appearance and trait im-

pressions, and then we relate this work to sociological research on race and punishment

and to contemporary sentencing theory. Finally, we review the empirical evidence regard-

ing initial trait impressions, appearance, and punishment before developing and testing

hypotheses about physical characteristics of defendants, subjective perceptions of threat,

and judicial imprisonment decisions.

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE, TRAIT INFERENCES, AND

STEREOTYPES

The notion that people infer personality traits from facial appearance dates back

to ancient civilization (McNeill, 1998), and facial features have long served as a

perceptual shorthand for judging friendliness, behavioral tendencies, and general