ABSTRACT
Ethnic and racial disparities in sentencing receive considerable scholarly inquiry. Much of this research, though, is limited to black/white or black/white/Hispanic comparisons in the United States. This study examines ethnic disparities in more detail by comparing imprisonment decisions for several understudied (specific) ethnic minority groups, such as Surinamese and Moroccan suspects. Moreover, this study addresses the fundamental issue about how distinct immigrant generations are sanctioned and whether this is a marker of stratification. This broadens our insight in the role of ethnicity as a sentencing factor, since the distinct ethnic groups and immigrant generations differ in their level of economic and social integration in the Dutch society. Three different datasets are analyzed to assess ethnic disparities in sentencing in the Netherlands, allowing us to take other sentencing factors, such as criminal history, offense characteristics, and personal circumstances, into account. These three data sources include data on different suspect populations because they are collected at different stages of the criminal proceedings. Results suggest that there are first-generation and second-generation ethnic disparities in imprisonment decisions in all datasets, even after controlling in detail for other sentencing factors.
