ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the relationship between race/ethnicity, physical appearance, and core theoretical constructs frequently invoked by contemporary sentencing theories. It offers three contributions to contemporary research on punishment disparities. First, it incorporates more proximate, appearance-based measures of the focal concerns of sentencing, including indicators of perceived dangerousness, blameworthiness, and ability to "do time" in prison. Second, the work expands the focus of prior disparity research to consider the effects of various facial appearance characteristics on subjective trait impressions. Contemporary sentencing theory routinely focuses on the association between race and stereotypes, but it rarely considers other aspects of physical appearance that might also shape stereotypical attributions. Finally, this work considers the interplay between race and other physical appearance characteristics. Specifically, it examines whether or not other facial features help to explain any of the observed association between defendant race and negative social attributions related to criminal punishment.
