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Race, Ethnicity, and Habitual-Offender Sentencing

A Multilevel Analysis of Individual and Contextual Threat

University of West Florida

Kathrine A. Johnson

University of West Florida

Although sentencing research has expanded over the past decade, very little has been published in the area of habitual-offender statutes. The current research revisits and updates two of the few studies that focused on these sentencing enhancements. Crawford, Chiricos, and Kleck (1998), and later Crawford (2000), examined the application of the habitual-offender sentence enhancement for offenders in Florida in 1992 and 1993. Consistent with the prior research, this study includes individual-level as well as county-level variables and also updates the analysis by examining more recent data, including a measure of ethnicity, and using hierarchical general linear modeling to simultaneously model individual-level data nested within counties. The racial threat perspective serves as the backdrop to explain racial and ethnic disparity in punishment decisions based on contextual as well as individual threat. The findings indicate that racial and ethnic sentence disparity exists when habitual-offender status is invoked in Florida.

Key Words: habitual offenders • sentencing • racial threat

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