Eliminating Sentencing Bias
Over the last few years as I watched the news I’ve seen movements and initiatives spring forth on topics ranging from gay rights to #metoo to trans-rights and Black Lives Matter. I used to pay scant attention to these movements because I couldn’t see the problem – and why would I? I’m a white, English-speaking straight man. But over the years, when I tried to see things from the perspective of those people affected by the issues I was generally met with hostility and harsh judgement. Often when I asked a question, in order to better understand, my words were perceived as a threat or slight. In the end I just stopped asking the questions and I opt out of most of the conversations.
But when it comes to the Black Lives Matter movement and the judicial system I think that there is a simple solution. The idea first came to me when I was involved in a Criminology Outreach program that had been organised by Bath Spa University which saw 10 criminology students working with 10 serving prisoners to address 6 key areas of criminal justice. My idea is blind sentencing.
When a defendant is found guilty at the conclusion of the trial I suggest that their case be wrapped up and submitted to a sentencing panel for consideration. The information that this panel should receive would be extremely limited and could include:
- The crime of which the defendant has been convicted
- The age of the defendant
- Previous convictions
- Mitigating features, e.g. provocation
- Aggravating features, e.g. hate crimes
The sentencing panel should be required to hand down a sentence based on this limited information alone. ‘Age’ is a valid consideration because a 5-year sentence would represent a far greater proportion of the defendants remaining life expectancy to a 70-year-old than to a 20-year-old. A useful exercise would be to calculate the average sentence across a specific offence in a particular age group and identify the disparities between the average length of sentence received and those sentences handed down according to ethnicity, gender, postcode and family background.
Watching and comparing sentencing trends would be interesting. Would custodial terms increase or decrease? How would the length of sentences be affected? What a black youth from London’s inner city attract a shorter sentence because the sentencing panel might worry about being too harsh on a white female defendant from a nice rural neighbourhood with a good family? Who knows – but at least it couldn’t be called racist.
