Trends in Prison Sentences and Racial Disparities: 20-Years of Sentencing Under Florida’s Criminal Punishment Code

• Author: Ojmarrh Mitchell,Shi Yan,Daniela Oramas Mora
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00224278221120677
• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Trends in Prison

Sentences and Racial

Disparities: 20-Years

of Sentencing Under

Florida’s Criminal

Punishment Code

Ojmarrh Mitchell

1

,ShiYan

1

,

and Daniela Oramas Mora

1

Abstract

Objectives: The U.S. prison population has fallen 15% overall, 28% for

Blacks, and 21% for Hispanics since the Great Recession began. These

trends occurred despite rising defendant criminal histories and the con-

tinued presence of the punitive policies that drove “mass incarceration.”

We test the central hypothesis that court actors employed several dis-

cretionary tools available under Florida’s sentencing system to reduce

prison use, which in turn reduced direct and indirect racial disparities.

Methods: To test this hypothesis, we utilized20yearsoffelonycases.

Our analyses employ current best practices for testing interactive effects

anddecompositionmodelstoidentifychangesinprisonuseandthefac-

tors associated with these changes. Results: We f‌ind criminal history

scores rose sharply, but prison use and racial disparities therein fell

1

School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA

Corresponding Author:

Ojmarrh Mitchell, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Arizona State University, 411

N. Central Ave., Suite 600, Phoenix, AZ 85004, USA.

Email: ojmarrh.mitchell@asu.edu

Thematic Issue: Centering Race in the Study of Crime and Criminal Justice

Journal of Research in Crime and

Delinquency

2023, Vol. 60(2) 300-338

© The Author(s) 2022

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/00224278221120677

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markedly in th e past decad e. The key facto rs driving th ese trends ar e

reductions in the inf‌luence of criminal history on decision-making,

increased use of mitigated departures, and the f‌lexibility of Florida’ssen-

tencing system to accommodate mitigated departures. In fact, if Florida’s

sentencing rules had been followed more closely, racial disparities in pri-

son sentences would have grown. Conclusions: This research has implica-

tions for reforms aimed at ending mass incarceration and reducing racial

disparities in imprisonment.

Keywords

Sentencing, courts, race/ethnicity, racial disparity

The literature on race and sentencing is voluminous and varied. In the great

bulk of this research, racial/ethnic disparities are studied over relatively short

time periods, and disparities are conceptualized narrowly. Very few studies

assess long-term trends in racial disparities over 15 or more years, particu-

larly in state courts. The dearth of such studies makes it diff‌icult to discern

whether racial/ethnic disparities have expanded, contracted, or remained

unchanged over time. Further, racial disparities are typically, but certainly

not always, measured as the direct relationship between race and sentencing

outcomes after controlling for “legally relevant”factors, such as prior crim-

inal record and the severity of the current offense (Baumer 2013; Omori and

Petersen 2020; Spohn 2000). This conceptualization is problematic as it

removes from examination the discretionary policymaking decisions of law-

makers that guide sanctioning (see e.g., Bushway and Forst 2013;

Schlesinger 2011) and the racialized social systems that may entrench

racial scripts into the everyday operations of courts (Bonilla-Silva 1997;

Omori and Petersen 2020; Van Cleve 2016). These racialized social

systems may be potent sources of institutionalized, indirect disparities as

certain formal policies and informal practices impact minorities dispropor-

tionately (see e.g., Bushway and Forst 2013; Omori and Petersen 2020;

Rehavi and Starr, 2012; Schlesinger 2011; Steffensmeier, Painter-Davis,

and Ulmer 2017).

The salience of institutional sources of racial disparities and research

examining long-term trends in disparities is heightened by the fact that the

U.S. criminal justice system in the past four decades has undergone a

series of massive policy changes that have caused the number of people

imprisoned to swell. The dramatic growth in the United States’prison

Mitchell et al. 301

population between 1973 and approximately 2010 was driven by a series of

punitive discretionary decisions made primarily by policymakers and crim-

inal justice authorities (Campbell and Schoenfeld 2013; National Research

Council 2014; Neal and Rick 2016). A nation once ostensibly devoted to

rehabilitation launched a war on drugs and adopted a “tough on crime”

(hereinafter TOC) philosophy that stressed the importance of certain and

severe criminal justice sanctions as central to effective crime control

(Tonry 2013). This philosophical shift manifested in a plethora of legal

and policy changes designed to stiffen sanction severity (e.g., mandatory

minimums, three strikes, truth in sentencing), especially for drug, violent,

and f‌irearms involved crimes (e.g., National Research Council 2014;

Tonry 2013; Western 2006). Criminal justice actors, particularly prosecu-

tors, also used their discretion in more punitive fashions primarily by charg-

ing more arrests as felonies at indictment, which in turn markedly increased

the probability of conviction and imprisonment (Beck and Blumstein 2012;

Pfaff 2017).

The punitive shift in America’s criminal justice system not only

caused its population to grow but also worsened racial and ethnic dispar-

ities in imprisonment. Between 1980 and 2010, Blacks’imprisonment

rate grew from 550 per 100,000 to 1,600, and throughout this period,

African Americans’imprisonment was roughly six times higher than

that of Whites (Beck and Blumstein 2012). Remarkably, in the 1990s,

African Americans, for the f‌irst time on record, became the racial major-

ity (51%) of those housed in U.S. prisons, despite comprising only 13%

of the general U.S. population (Mitchell 2018; Spohn 2015). Hispanic

imprisonment rates also grew in this period. Specif‌ically, in 1990 this

rate was 581 per 100,000 Hispanic U.S. residents, peaked at 745 in

1999, and hovered around 660 from 2000 to 2010; by contrast, this

rate for Whites never exceeded 265 per 100,000 (Beck and Blumstein

2012).

However, starting in the late-2000s, in the midst of the Great Recession,

the punitiveness pendulum swung in the opposite direction with decreasing

imprisonment rates and racial/ethnic imbalances in imprisonment. While

still elevated in historical terms, between 2008 and 2018, the U.S. imprison-

ment rate dropped 15% overall, 28% for African Americans, 21% for

Hispanics, and 13% for Whites (Carson 2019). Despite these reductions

in the use of prison, the number of convicted felons in America continues

to grow, resulting in criminal defendants accumulating greater levels of

criminal history. Thus, at the same time that prison use is declining, criminal

history has been rising.

302 Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 60(2)