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Grant details

ESRC £48,408

Project start and end dates

April 2021 to September 2022 funding period but work still ongoing

Research team members

PI: Dr Angela Sorsby

Background and aims of the project

Research has found that people of minority ethnic backgrounds are overrepresented within the criminal justice system in England and Wales. This is particularly the case for people who are Black, who are overrepresented at every stage of the criminal justice process except for caution. The Lammy Review highlights this and also highlights that there is a lack of evidence on the causes of overrepresentation which leads to a tendency to dismiss differences between ethnic groups by suggesting that any differences may be due to other factors, such as the age profile of defendants, rather than due to ethnicity itself.

The project aims to identify differences in court case outcomes after taking account of other factors such as age and offence type.

Methods

The de-identified magistrates’ and Crown Court datasets made available via the Data First programme give access to case level administrative data on criminal court use. They include information on things such as age, type of offence, whether there are co-defendants, and more. The project uses regression analysis to establish whether ethnic disparities remain after taking account of things such as age and offence type.

Key findings to date

White men and women have significantly more previous convictions before they receive a short prison sentence than men and women in other ethnic groups. These differences remain significant after controlling for plea type, court type, offence type and age, for all ethnic groups apart women of ‘mixed’ ethnicity.

Project publications to date

• , November 2021
• , May 2022
• , August 2022
• , November 2022
• Choosing to have a Crown Court trial for a theft offence: Consequences and relationships with ethnicity, forthcoming