Socioeconomic Status and Sentencing Disparities: Evidence from Russia’s Criminal Courts

This article contributes to the sociological research of sentencing disparities. Using the dataset consisting of 1.5 million individual decisions of criminal courts of the Russian Federation, the study focuses on the influence of socio-economic status of defendants on decisions to acquit, imprison, suspend imprisonment as well as on the severity of punishment. The regression analysis shows strong and consistent social inequalities.

The system of criminal repression is targeted mostly against socially marginal and lower status strata (prisoners, unemployed, manual workers) which constitute the absolute majority of defendants and are punished more harshly than representatives of the upper strata. Besides that, the study reveals another dimension of conflict: private entrepreneurs receive more severe punishments than public officials, especially for white-collar crimes. To make initial assumptions about the ways these regularities are produced at the interaction level, the study uses interviews with judges and results of the original survey.

You can download the full text of working paper in English (PDF)