A Plea for Justice: Racial Bias in Pretrial Decision Making

African American defendants are more likely than Whites to be charged punitively by prosecutors at arraignment, detained pretrial, and sentenced harshly via plea bargain. These disparities contribute to mass incarceration, because 95% of cases adjudicate by plea bargain rather than a jury trial. Prior research has found that implicit racial bias (unconscious attitudes and stereotypes about race) and dehumanization bias (thinking of others as less human) are associated with racial disparities in areas of the justice system outside of pretrial decision making. This study poses the following questions: (1) Are implicit racial bias, explicit racial bias, implicit dehumanization bias, and/or explicit dehumanization bias associated with pretrial decision making (for each of initial charge, bail, target plea sentence, minimum acceptable plea sentence, and charge reduction)? (2) What are the relative influences of implicit racial bias, explicit racial bias, implicit dehumanization bias, and explicit dehumanization bias? A total of 148 students from the UCLA School of Law read a fictional criminal case vignette and then made pretrial decisions in the role of prosecutor. The race of the defendant was randomly assigned to be either African American or White while all other aspects of the vignette were held constant. Higher anti-African American/pro-White implicit dehumanization bias was associated with a less punitive initial robbery charge for the White defendant. Greater anti-African American/pro-White implicit racial bias was associated with three outcomes for the White defendant in a direction contrary to implicit bias theory: setting a higher bail amount, targeting a longer prison sentence for the plea bargain, and being less likely to offer a charge reduction. In supplemental analyses, participants who believed in the biological basis of race were less likely to charge the White defendant more punitively. The results suggest that implicit dehumanization bias and implicit racial bias influence pretrial decision making but that only implicit dehumanization bias contributes to racial disparity. Future research could test these results with working prosecutors and defense attorneys to expand the generalizability of the findings