The Impact of Race, Gender, and Age on the Pretrial Decision Article Review

Tina L. Freiburger and Carly M. Hilinski (2015) offer an informative and explorative article that discusses their recent research on how race, gender, and age affect defendants’ odds of pretrial detention. The researchers note that typically, judges utilize the focal concerns perspective when making sentencing decisions. The focal concerns are blameworthiness, dangerousness, and practical constraints. They noted that due to limited time constraints, leading to limited information during the pretrial stages, judges often use an offender’s demographic characteristics, specifically age, gender, and race, to make sentencing decisions. The researchers acknowledge previous studies regarding pretrial and various demographics however, they note that there have not been any studies that examined the impact of gender, race, and age interactions on early court decisions. Freiburger and Hilinski (2015) examined the effects of race, gender, and age on the pretrial detention outcomes of 2,635 felony cases in a county in Michigan. They collected information from the individuals’ completed presentence reports for offenders that were convicted of a personal, drug, property, or public order offense during 2006. They controlled for a dichotomized measure of the actual pretrial outcome of defendants released prior to sentencing and defendants detained prior to sentencing. The researchers also controlled for legal variables such as offense severity, offense type, and current criminal justice supervision. They also controlled for extralegal variables such as gender, race, age, education, marital status, and direct employment. Freiburger and Hilinski (2015) found that the majority of male and female offenders were between the ages of 15-29. Male and female offenders were more likely to be White, unmarried, and without a high school diploma. It was found that gender and age directly affect pretrial outcomes, as females and young defendants were viewed as less blameworthy and dangerous. Black defendants were less likely to be released pretrial than White defendants were, and this seemed to stem from not having the financial resources to secure release. Black females were least likely to be detained than White females. The results also show that judges were giving less consideration to legal factors for females than for males, as the inclusion of family responsibility variables might work in the favor of the females.