Assessing Gender and Racial Bias in Sentencing in Rio De Janeiro

The paper will test the existence of racial and gender bias, and the possibility of an interaction between them, on criminal sentencing in Brazil, using a database of  19,176 prison sentences adjudicated in Rio de Janeiro between 1996 and 2006 for various types of crimes. 

The main dependent variable is sentence length and the effect of several individual and contextual variables will be controlled for. Among these, we can mention:  age of the offender at the time the crime was committed, number of previous prison sentences served, type of crime , whether or not the person was sentenced for a crime over the last 5 years (which determines the legal definition of reoffending in Brazilian legislation), educational attainment, marital status and whether or not the offender had a serious illness at the time of sentence.  Another important factor to control for is whether or not the offender was caught in the act (in flagrante delicto), which is an important determinant of how the Brazilian criminal justice system proceeds.

In addition to that, we want to test whether severity of sentence varies across different courts and whether bias might be present in just some of them. In order to do that  a crossed random effects model will be  fitted to the data to allow for variation at both the court level and individual level.