The Impact of Gender and Race-Ethnicity in the Pretrial Release Process

This study analyzes pretrial release data on a sample of felony defendants representing the nation’s 75 most populated counties for 1990‐1996 to assess the main and interactive effects of gender and race-ethnicity on both pretrial release decisions and outcomes . We find that both gender and race-ethnicity have moderately strong main effects on whether the defendant secures pretrial release, net of controls for legal factors like prior record and offense conduct. Female defendants are more likely to receive pretrial release than their male counterparts, while Hispanic and black defendants are more likely to be detained than similarly situated white defendants. Most notably, we find that compared to all other gender-racial/ethnic defendant groups, white females are the most likely to receive pretrial release. In contrast, Hispanic males receive the most disadvantaging decisions throughout the pretrial release process and are the group most likely to be detained. A major factor that explains this discrepancy in outcomes is the inability of many Hispanics and blacks to post bail to gain their release. An assessment of the research on gender disparities in the case processing of criminal defendants highlights two major shortcomings. First, in addition to the relative paucity of studies examining the treatment of women in the courts, there is in particular a lack of research on decision making at earlier stages of the criminal case process (e.g., pretrial release). Indeed, most of what we know about the treatment of women in the criminal courts is based on the impact of gender at the sentencing stage. This narrow research focus on sentencing is not limited to studies involving gender, but rather is also a notable limitation of prior studies examining race and ethnicity in the courts. Data are more readily available for examinations of sentencing, in part, because sentencing is (1) more proximate to jail and prison and is viewed as where the “real” punishments are meted out and (2) more visible and more highly regulated than other stages. Second, there is a scarcity of research examining possible interactive effects between gender and race, and even more so, interactive effects between gender and ethnicity —i.e., the inclusion of Hispanic defendants. Despite a rapidly growing Hispanic population in the United States, research on case processing has been slow to examine the treatment of this ethnic minority group. Prior sentencing research (Steffensmeier, Ulmer, and Kramer 1998) demonstrates the importance of considering the joint effects of social statuses such as race and gender. Not only may the joint effects of race and gender be considerably larger than either single main effect, but an examination of interactive effects may also reveal extra-legal disparities that are otherwise masked when examining additive models. At issue, in particular, is the question of whether gender differences in case processing outcomes for criminal defendants are similar/different across different racial and ethnic groups.