Work

Reducing biases in the criminal legal system: A perspective from expected utility.

Year: 2024

Type: article

Abstract: OBJECTIVE: Racial biases exist in almost every aspect of the criminal legal system, resulting in disparities across all stages of legal procedures-before, during, and after a legal procedure. Building on expected utility theory, we propose an expected utility framework to organize and quantify racial disparities in legal procedures. HYPOTHESES: Corresponding to the parameteres involved in estimating expected utility, we hypothesized that racial biases would occur at different stages of legal procedures. METHOD: Using police interrogation procedures as an example, we obtained estimates from previous literature and demonstrated that racial disparities exist at each stage of legal procedures. We then used these estimates to compute and visualize expected utilities, which quantify the average long-term outcomes of interrogations for minority versus nonminority suspects. RESULTS: Based on this hypothetical example, the expected utility analysis suggests that biases at various stages of interrogations could potentially lead to substantial disparities in legal outcomes between racial groups. In particular, the example shows that interrogations might yield notably worse outcomes for minority suspects than nonminority suspects because of cumulative biases that occur before, during, and after this legal procedure. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed expected utility approach not only offers a valuable tool for accounting the joint impacts of multiple stages of legal procedures to quantify racial disparities but also carries important implications for how the criminal legal system could reduce such disparities. That is, the criminal legal system must seek to reduce racial biases across all stages of legal procedures rather than focusing on just one aspect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Source: Law and Human Behavior

DOI: 10.1037/lhb0000571

Authors: Janice L. Burke, Justice Healy, Yueran Yang

Institution: University of Nevada, Reno

Language: English

Topic: Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis

Subfield: Sociology and Political Science

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Peace, justice, and strong institutions, Reduced inequalities

Open Access status: hybrid

Funder: National Science Foundation