Within-race variations in sentencing outcomes: Nationality and punishment among Asians in United States federal courts
| Author | Jawjeong Wu |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745211063120 |
| Published date | 01 April 2023 |
| Date | 01 April 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Within-race variations
in sentencing outcomes:
Nationality and
punishment among
Asians in United States
federal courts
Jawjeong Wu
SUNY Buffalo State, Buffalo, NY, USA
Abstract
There is robust evidence that Asians are not treated differently from Whites and receive
greater leniency than Blacks and Hispanics in criminal punishment. Some research find-
ings even suggest that Asians receive the most favorable sentencing outcomes among all
racial/ethnic groups. This line of research, however, has not paid attention to Asian
nationality groups. Particularly, it is unclear whether there is within-race variation
among offenders from different Asian countries. Using the data compiled by the
United States Sentencing Commission to examine whether and how an Asian’s nation-
ality affects criminal punishment, this study focuses on sentences imposed on offenders
who are Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Korean, Pakistani, and Vietnamese nationals. Results
from logistic, ordinary least squares, and Tobit regression analyses indicate that with
legal and extralegal factors held constant, Asians of different nationalitie s face varying
odds of incarceration or downward departures, and they receive dissimilar sentence
lengths.
Keywords
Asian, disparity, federal sentencing, immigration, nationality, punishment
Corresponding author:
Jawjeong Wu, Criminal Justice Department, SUNY Buffalo State, 1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14222,
USA.
Email: wuj@buffalostate.edu
Article
Punishment & Society
2023, Vol. 25(2) 449–470
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14624745211063120
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
Research on unwarranted racial/ethnic disparities has prospered over the last several
decades. It was not until the late 2000s that sentencing research advanced in the direction
of race, ethnicity, and nationality/national origin.
1
Regarding race, research specifically
examined such understudied groups as Asian and Native American offenders (e.g.
Franklin, 2013; Franklin and Fearn, 2015; Johnson and Betsinger, 2009; Ulmer and
Bradley, 2018; Wu and Kim, 2014). Moreover, the recent literature on the effect of eth-
nicity has gone beyond the contrast between Hispanics and non-Hispanics and begun to
address the effects of related concepts, such as citizenship, nationality, and national
origin, using data from different countries. This line of analysis has compared United
States (US) citizens with legal US residents from worldwide countries (Iles, 2009), the
Dutch with Europeans or non-Europeans (Johnson et al., 2010; also see Van
Wingerden et al., 2016), Germans with European Union (EU) or non-EU immigrants
(Light, 2016), Mexicans with non-Mexican Latinos (Logue, 2009, 2017), and US-born
offenders with Mexican-born or non-Mexican-born offenders (Orrick and Piquero,
2015).
Although the research trend in courts and sentencing has shifted to citizenship and
nationality/national origin, to my knowledge, none of the existing studies has empirically
examined the potentially differential punishment among Asian subgroups of different
nationalities. This is unfortunate as scholars have recently advocated the importance of
studying Asian offenders (e.g. Franklin and Fearn, 2015; Johnson and Betsinger, 2009;
Ulmer, 2012). There has been empirical support for great leniency offered to Asians
based on the model minority hypothesis, controlling for legal and extralegal factors
(Franklin and Fearn, 2015; Johnson and Betsinger, 2009). This finding, however,
does not indicate that courtroom decision-makers view all Asian subgroups in the
same way or that Asians of different nationalities are treated similarly. To fill the
gap, this study seeks to understand whether sentencing differentials exist among
Asians of different nationalities in federal courts and, if so, the extent to which they
are treated. Given the limitation on the number of cases for each Asian nationality to
be analyzed properly, this study focuses on Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Korean,
Pakistani, and Vietnamese nationals.
Citizenship status, nationality/national origin, and sentencing
A line of scholarship on how citizenship status affects American criminal sentencing has
often differentiated non-US citizens from US citizens (Light, 2014; Wu and D’Angelo,
2014) or, more precisely, divided the sample into legal aliens, illegal aliens, and US citi-
zens (Demuth, 2002, Light et al., 2014; Wolfe et al., 2011). Although these studies have
generally reported higher odds of incarceration for non-US citizens than for US citizens,
the effect of citizenship status on sentence lengths is less clear. Some found the same or
shorter incarceration terms imposed on non-US citizens (Demuth, 2002; Wolfe et al.,
2011; Wu and D’Angelo, 2014), whereas others revealed significantly longer sentence
lengths for this group (Light, 2014; Light et al., 2014).
450 Punishment & Society 25(2)
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