Racial bias in criminal sentencing: Historical evidence from Chinese railway workers in British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Do discriminatory attitudes held in the public influence public institutions? We study this question within the context of the criminal justice system of historical British Columbia (BC). During the late 1870s and early 1880s, an influx of Chinese immigrant workers employed in the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was the catalyst for a wave of anti‐Chinese sentiment in British Columbia (BC). We test for the presence of racial bias in criminal sentencing during this era by comparing marginal sentences for predicted recidivism risk across groups in a triple difference framework, using the building of the CPR as a plausibly exogenous shock to recidivism. We find that during the early years of the building boom, Chinese prisoners received sentences that were over twice as long as other observationally equivalent prisoners per unit of recidivism risk. Robustness exercises illustrate that this result is similar if we focus on the size of Chinese immigration instead of recidivism risk. We find that this sentencing bias is temporary, and dissipates towards the end of the project, coincident with labor shortages that threatened its viability.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".