Sources of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Florida’s Monetary Sanctions: Disparate Impact or Disparate Treatment

Recent research documents racial and ethnic disparities in monetary sanctions; however, it remains unclear whether disparities are attributable to policies with racially or ethnically disparate impacts, differential application of sanctions by court actors, or both. In this study, we examine the existence and nature of racial and ethnic disparities in monetary sanctions. Using case-level data, we employ three-level multilevel modeling (cases nested within judges, nested within counties) and apply entropy weighting to balance cases on observed characteristics. Our results indicate that inequalities operate through both disparate treatment, via court actor discretion, and disparate impact, through policies that dictate higher sanctions for certain offenses and spatial concentration of socioeconomic disadvantage. However, the evidence of disparate impact is weaker and more complicated than the evidence of disparate treatment. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that Florida’s administration of monetary sanctions contributes to direct and indirect racial and ethnic inequalities within the justice system.