Racial bias in criminal sentencing: Historical evidence from Chinese railway workers in British Columbia

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.