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MANN Feature: Inequality in Sentencing
posted by Scott on Friday August 17, @01:40PM
from the feature-submission dept.
Feature Submission Our latest feature article was written by Marc Angelucci and is on the double standards of justice America has for male and female criminals. Are women really treated more leniently than men for the same crime? If so, how does it compare to racial differences in sentencing? Read on for a superb eye-opening article that was so thoroughly researched that Marc also got it published in the Los Angeles Daily Journal, a reputable legal newspaper.

Males Get Longer Sentences than Females for Same Crime

Originally printed in: Los Angeles Daily Journal
August 1, 2001

Author: Marc Angelucci, Angelucci2000@alumni.law.ucla.edu

When Etta Ann Urdiales was murdered in Colorado, two completely different juries convicted two different people of the crime. Both juries believed there was only one murderer. One convicted Bobbie Hogan, a woman. The other convicted Jess Jacobs, a man. She got 10 years in prison. He was put to death.

This case is just one example of the discrimination men face in criminal courts throughout the United States.

According to Pradeep Ramanathan, vice president of the National Coalition of Free Men (NCFM), a volunteer, non-profit organization that has explored and addressed men's issues since 1976, "All the research clearly demonstrates that gender is the most significant biasing factor in determining whether or not someone will be charged, prosecuted, indicted and sentenced, as well as determining the severity of the sentence."

And Ramanathan is right.

Department of Justice figures show that being male increases a murderer's chance of receiving a death sentence by more than 20 times. And the data repeatedly confirms that men receive higher sentences than women for the exact same crime.

One study, published in Justice Quarterly in 1986, examined 181,197 felonies in California and found that, for the same crime, being male increased the chance of incarceration by 165 percent. Being black, in comparison, increased the chance of incarceration by 19 percent.

Another study, published in Crime & Delinquency in 1989, examined non-accomplice crimes and factored together the number of charges, convicted offenses, prior felony convictions, as well as the race, age, work history and family situation of the accused and found that "gender differences, favoring women, are more often found than race differences, favoring whites."

In yet another study, published in the International Journal of the Sociology of Law, researchers Mathew Zingraff and Randall Thomson found that being male increases sentence lengths more than any other discriminatory variable.

The bias applies to victims as well as the accused. When Edward Glaeser of Harvard University and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth College examined 2,800 homicide cases randomly drawn from 33 urban counties by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, they found that killing a female instead of a male increased sentences by 40.6 percent. Killing a white instead of a black, in comparison, increased sentences by 26.8 percent.

Even when the exact same type of crime is accounted for, the disparities still persist. For example, a drunk driver who kills a black male receives an average sentence of two years. A drunk driver who kills a white male, four years. A drunk driver who kills a white female, six years.

To those who recognize the problem, gender stereotypes are a major culprit. In a 1991 NCFM report titled "Gender and Injustice," researchers John Ryan and Ian Wilson suggest the problem stems from stereotypes about women being more innocent, more reformable and less dangerous than men. Barbara Swartz, former Director of New York's Women's Prison Project, called it the "chivalry factor" and says, "If there were more women judges, more women would go to jail."

Others attribute the problem to the devaluing of male lives.

But addressing the causes does little good when the public does not even recognize the problem. One reason that we don't is that the task forces that we appoint to investigate the problem are just as biased as the legal system that they are supposed to monitor, so a full picture of the bias never gets drawn.

In 1980, the National Organization for Women and the National Association of Women Judges formed the National Judicial Education Program to Promote Equality for Women and Men in the Courts (NJEP). In 1986, they wrote "Operating a Task Force on Gender Bias in the Courts: A Manual for Action," which became the manual used by gender bias task forces nationwide. The manual opens by stating that gender bias operates more frequently against women and that it is not a contradiction for task forces to focus primarily on bias against women in courts.

As one might guess, this is exactly what the task forces do.

"None of (the commissions) study bias against men," said Ramanathan.

For example, even though men are more likely to get prison and women to get probation for the same crime, a New York task force claimed that it is women who were discriminated against because - get this - they receive longer probation periods.

One commission recently justified giving women shorter sentences because women are often custodial parents. But the sentencing disparities persisted in the above studies that took family situations are accounted for. So even if custodial parenthood justifies a shorter sentence, courts are giving men longer sentences than women even when neither (or both) are custodial parents. Needless to say, when a father commits a crime, the courts have no trouble calling him an unfit parent and removing him from his kids.

The gender bias in our courts and in our gender bias task forces is not just an injustice to the victims; it is a tragic betrayal of public trust. In fact, as embarrassing as it sounds, we may need to create task forces to investigate the gender bias of the task forces that we created to investigate gender bias in the first place.

Marc Angelucci is a public interest attorney in Los Angeles and the local representative of the National Coalition of Free Men.

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angelucci's piece (Score:1)
by remarksman on Saturday August 18, @12:59PM EST (#1)
(User #241 Info)
Well done, Mark.

I was associate public information officer for the California Supreme Court and the Judicial Council of California from 1984 to 1991. The Council is the administrative, rule-making agency for the California Court system as a whole. The Administrative Office of the Courts acts as “lay” staff to the Council.

During that time, the Council – like many other similar entities across the country – propagated rules relating to “gender bias,” deeply altering both the procedures of the California Court system, and the gender perceptions of court officers and the state legal and political community. Many rules, news releases and reports on “gender bias in the courts” emerged from the Council during these years. A “advisory committee” on Gender Bias in the Courts was commissioned to re-write administrative rules and court procedures involving “gender bias,” and to publish their “research findings.” I typically edited and disseminated final copy on many of these documents. I also produced many of the attendant publications.

In 1990 the committee became the 14th such state “task force” to publish reports “documenting” the widespread gender bias which females allegedly face in the California court system. A little-known fact is that the National Organization for Women was the driving force behind these task forces, working closely with administrative staff from the various states to ensure that “gender bias” was rooted out and dealt with severely.

The title of the Council’s 1990 report betrays its design and bias: “Achieving Equal Justice for Women in the Courts.”

As Mr. Angelucci’s article implies, these committees – not only in California, but nationwide – had and have no interest whatsoever in justice, equality, or “gender bias.” The committees were, and are, rubber stamps for feminist ideology and the current variant of neo-matriarchal vengeance. They are power grabs operating under cover of “equality” and “justice.” I worked every day with the female agency staffers who led the committee, did the “research,” and re-wrote the court rules. I also had access to committee meetings. In such bureaucratic labyrinths, it is agency staff who write, and often effectively determine, policy. Council committees and the full Council rarely disagree when casting final votes.

Believe me, no one on either staff or the Council raised any questions when the New Boss ladies in their padded shoulders strode the halls with incalculable righteousness and propagated their New Rules. No one dared question any aspect of a review of “gender bias” in the California court system that was gender-unilateral. As in the rest of the culture, women were deemed oppressed by men, and courts therefore needed to rescue females from their slavery and alter any last shred of policy in the courts that attempted authentic gender balance.

And so it was done, and so it is done. Mark Angelucci’s report does us a valuable service, but only the iceberg’s tip has been sighted. The gender supremacists are absolutely convinced of the moral elevation of their agendas, and will use any means to prove and propagate their designs.

The roots of masculocide in America are deep and well-hidden, and the regressions of the past four decades will be remedied only at great cost to the nation and its male members.

Ray Remark

Thanks to Mark Angelucci! (Score:0)
by Anonymous User on Monday August 20, @11:48AM EST (#2)
Thank you for substantiating what most of us men have suspected all along. Bob L
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