“Judges on the Benchmark: Developing a Sentencing Feedback System”

The title of this post is the title of this new article just published in the Justice Quarterly online authored by Viet Nguyen and Greg Ridgeway. Here is abstract:

Judges receive limited information on how their sentencing practices contribute to inter-judge sentencing disparities which can undermine equity and the perceptions of legitimacy.  We use doubly robust, internal benchmarking to measure the effect of each judge on sentencing outcomes relative to a set of cases that are handled by the judge’s peers and that are statistically similar on all observable case features.  With the benchmarks, we can flag judges with extreme sentencing habits and link those sentencing habits with their discretionary decisions.  Judges with the highest propensity in using custodial sentences were 22 percentage points more likely to impose an incarceration sentence and 5 percentage points more likely to use a prison sentence compared to their peers’ handling of similar cases.  States can adopt this approach to provide feedback throughout a judge’s tenure to move judges that contribute most to disparities to have sentencing practices more similar to their peers.