Exploring Confounding Variables: Understanding if Gender Impacts the Duration of Criminal Sentencing11/21/2019 - Morgan Rutkowski Hypotheses and Motivation As mentioned in Lorrie’s post, we see the original study we would be conducting. However, within every study, there is always the possibility of a confounding variable. Therefore, I added sex as another independent layer that could impact sentencing duration for criminals. For the null hypothesis, we thought that there would be no racial or sexual bias in judicial decisions involving murder cases within the federal jurisdiction of the United States. Moreover, for our alternative hypothesis, we would say that there is some sort of racial and/or sexual bias in judicial decisions involving murder cases within the federal jurisdiction of the United States. Two studies to examine that are similar include Travis Franklin’s study on if there is racial disparity in criminal sentencing and if race influences the duration of the sentence (Franklin, 2018) and Kathleen Daly’s study on if their gender (sex) influences the sentencing duration of the offender, whether they are female or a male. Ultimately, although both have an impact, gender has a stronger statistical significance on sentencing duration. Overall, we are studying the criminal justice’s sentencing system because we want to find out if the race, from the original study, and now the sex of the criminal have an effect on the severity of the punishment given by the judicial decisions involving murder cases within the federal jurisdiction of the United States, in order to help the readers understand if fair treatment is being given under the Sixth Amendment by judicial actors for biological factors they cannot control. For this project, the following variables are listed below: Description of Concepts, Data, and Measurement In our study, our operationalized independent variables from Harvard’s DataVerse include race (White vs People of Color) (US Census Bureau), murder type (Murder vs Not Murder) (“18 U.S. Code § 1111 - Murder.”), and Sex (either Male or Female) (Holmes, 2007). For our operationalized dependent variable, we looked at severity of punishment (in months) (United States Sentencing Commission). Our independent variable of race and murder, with the new addition of sex, causes our dependent variable of duration of the punishment to increase, especially with a stronger significance to if the criminal is a male possibility due to the fact that women could be seen as docile and “submissive” in comparison to a male who can seem more aggressive and “dangerous”. Several concepts have been listed in Lorries post, including Murder (at the federal level), Race (and a description of all 5 categories), and Severity of Punishment. However, unique to my version, would be describing what “Sex” is vs what “Gender” is. Although there has been some recent debate on there being a difference between “Gender” and “Sex” of an individual, for the purpose of this study, “Sex” will be the biological difference and not the socially produced differences between being “masculine” and “feminine” (Holmes, 2007). Presentation of Analysis and Results Figure 1: Figure 2: Figure 3: From the hypothesis test run in the figures 1-2 above, we see that while race alone, race with murder, and race with both murder and gender were all shown, we see the strongest statistically significant difference come from gender impacting the duration in months of the imprisonment of the criminal. Figure 3 represents this difference between the two sexes.
For this study, I ran a linear regression model examining Race (White =1 and People of Color=2), Murder (Murder =1 and Not Murder=2), and Sex (Male =1 and Female =2) in conversation with sentencing in months (DV). After running this test, I found that race only averaged a difference in a couple of months, about 1.785 months, when comparing a white person vs a person of color, resulting in a significance level of 0.117, which is not significant enough to express any real meaning to follow. However, when you add murder to race, the number of months dramatically increases, about 37.8 months, which makes sense because murder should result in a bigger difference in months when comparing it to someone who did not commit murder, resulting in a 0.000 significance. Finally, when adding gender/sex to the test, we saw that females were less likely to have a longer sentence than if the offender was a male, with about -4.470 months, favoring women, with a significance level of 0.015. With all of this in mind, we see that race did not have a large enough significant difference on the outcome of severity on punishment. Instead, I found that the crime type (murder or not murder) and if the offender was female vs male did show a statistically significant difference. Ultimately, committing murder and being a male offender would increase the number of months in prison than if they did not commit murder and/or they were female. Work Cited Daly, Kathleen. Gender, Crime, and Punishment. Yale University Press, 1994. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=52930&site=eds-live&scope=site. Franklin, Travis W. “The State of Race and Punishment in America: Is Justice Really Blind?” Journal of Criminal Justice, vol. 59, Nov. 2018, pp. 18–28. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2017.05.011. Holmes, Mary. “What Is Gender?” Google Books, Google, 2007, https://books.google.com/books?id=agLzMDaeYB4C&lpg=PP2&ots=5W9kaz6R9e&dq=what is gender&lr&pg=PA2#v=onepage&q&f=false. United States Sentencing Commission. “PDF.” 2010. https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/federal-sentencing-statistics/quarterly-sentencing-updates/USSC_2010_Quarter_Report_Final.pdf US Census Bureau. “About Race.” About, United States Census Bureau, 23 Jan. 2018, https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html. “18 U.S. Code § 1111 - Murder.” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1111.
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