“Michael Tonry’s Contributions to Research Identifying and Explaining Racial Disparities in Sentencing”

The title of this post is the title of this article authored by Cassia Spohn in the June 2025 issue of the Criminal Law Forum. (As noted in this prior post, this journal issue is devoted to celebrating the work of sentencing guru Michael Tonry, and I will be flagging various individual articles from the issue in the weeks ahead).  Here is the abstract of Spohn’s article:

Michael Tonry has made important contributions to research on sentencing, and especially to research examining racial and ethnic disparities in sentence outcomes.  The purpose of this paper is to describe two of the many ways in which Tonry’s ground-breaking research and scholarship transformed the landscape of empirical sentencing research. His influential books and articles documenting why “sentencing matters” encouraged sentencing scholars to evaluate the effects of the sentencing “reforms” enacted during the War on Crime and the War on Drugs, with a focus on determining whether these changes to sentencing policies and practices reduced sentence disparities.  Moreover, his critique of the War on Drugs and his argument that the war was being fought primarily in minority communities led to a substantial body of work on unwarranted disparities in sentencing for drug offenses.  These are indeed significant contributions.