OBJECTIVE Our goal was to develop a framework to test for implicit racial bias in discretionary decisions made by community supervision agents in conditions with increasing information ambiguity. HYPOTHESES We reasoned that as in-person contact decreases, community supervision officers' specific knowledge of clients would be replaced by heuristics that lead to racially disproportionate outcomes in higher discretion events. Officers' implicit biases would lead to disproportionately higher technical violation rates among Black community corrections' clients when they have less personal contact, but we expected no analogous increase in nondiscretionary decisions. METHOD Using data from Black and White clients entering probation and postrelease supervision in North Carolina from 2012 through 2016, we estimated the difference in racial disparities in discretionary versus nondiscretionary decisions across five levels of supervision. We evaluated the robustness of our main fixed-effects model using an alternative regression discontinuity design. RESULTS Racial disparities in discretionary decisions grew as supervision intensity decreased, and the bias was larger for women than men. There was no similar pattern of increased disparity for nondiscretionary decisions. CONCLUSIONS Criminal justice system actors have a great deal of discretion, particularly in how they deal with less serious criminal behavior. Although decentralized decisions are foundational to the function of the criminal justice system, they provide an opportunity for implicit bias to seep in. Shortcuts and mental heuristics are more influential when the decision-maker's mental resources are already strained-for instance, if someone is tired, distracted, or overworked. Therefore, limiting discretion and increasing oversight and accountability may reduce the impact of implicit bias on criminal justice system outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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对自由裁量刑事司法决定中隐性偏见的检验。

目标 我们的目标是开发一个框架来测试社区监督代理人在信息模糊性增加的情况下做出的自由裁量决定中隐含的种族偏见。假设 我们推断，随着面对面接触的减少，社区监督官员对客户的具体了解将被启发式方法所取代，从而导致在更高自由裁量权事件中出现种族不成比例的结果。官员的隐性偏见会导致黑人社区矫正客户在个人接触较少时出现不成比例的更高技术违规率，但我们预计非酌情决定不会出现类似的增加。方法 使用 2012 年至 2016 年在北卡罗来纳州进入缓刑和释放后监督的黑人和白人客户的数据，我们估计了在五个监督级别中自由裁量权决定与非自由裁量权决定中种族差异的差异。我们使用替代回归不连续性设计评估了主要固定效应模型的稳健性。结果 随着监督强度的降低，自由裁量决定中的种族差异越来越大，而且女性的偏见大于男性。对于非自由裁量的决定，没有类似的差异增加模式。结论 刑事司法系统参与者有很大的自由裁量权，特别是在他们如何处理不太严重的犯罪行为方面。尽管分散决策是刑事司法系统运作的基础，但它们为隐性偏见提供了渗透的机会。当决策者“ 人的精神资源已经很紧张了——例如，如果有人疲倦、分心或工作过度。因此，限制自由裁量权并加强监督和问责制可能会减少隐性偏见对刑事司法系统结果的影响。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。