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Meanwhile, our race-specific findings may explain why although this and earlier studies find negligible main effects of race on criminal justice outcomes, black Americans nonetheless perceive more criminal injustice than do whites. However, because our data precede the latter act, they confirm that this act simply reinstitutionalized earlier practice. While the effect of community ties has been legally legitimized since the Bail Reform Act of 1966, the effect of dangerousness was not so legitimized until the Bail Reform Act of 1984. Two further variables, dangerousness and community ties, increase bail severity among blacks and whites. Prior record is also found to operate to the greater advantage of whites. Education and income are treated in this study as observed components of a composite construct, stratification resources, which works to the greater advantage of whites. The operation of this principle is established through the estimation of covariance structure models of pretrial release decisions affecting 5660 defendants in 10 federal courts.

The principle observed here in the making of bail decisions, as in earlier studies of the allocation of earnings, is that stratification resources operate to the greater advantage of whites than blacks. Our purpose is to bridge the criminal justice and stratification research literatures and to pursue the argument that homologous structural principles stratify allocation processes across central institutions of American society.

Manhattan bail project findings