Guideline-Based Justice: Prediction and Racial Minorities

Although blacks compose only 12 percent of the national population, they account for almost 50 percent of the prison population. Many states have adopted the use of guidelines for sentencing, parole, and decisions concerning the level of probationer supervision. Some argue that use of certain factors in guidelines systematically adversely affects minority offenders. The extent to which commonly used guideline factors are correlated with race and recidivism was established using data on over 16,500 offenders convicted of felonies in California in 1980. Race and recidivism correlations were calculated for all convicted felons, for probationers, and for prisoners. When all factors in the data base were used, accuracy in predicting rearrests was seldom greater than a 20 percent improvement over chance. The use only of factors that were not racially correlated increased predictive accuracy from 3 to 9 percent above chance; including racially correlated factors increased predictive accuracy another 5-12 percent. When status factors related to race are excluded, the guidelines identify high-risk criminals about as well as they do now, but racially correlated factors that reflect seriousness of crimes cannot be omitted unless society is willing to treat serious offenders less severely because many of them are black.