OBJECTIVE Racial biases exist in almost every aspect of the criminal legal system, resulting in disparities across all stages of legal procedures-before, during, and after a legal procedure. Building on expected utility theory, we propose an expected utility framework to organize and quantify racial disparities in legal procedures. HYPOTHESES Corresponding to the parameteres involved in estimating expected utility, we hypothesized that racial biases would occur at different stages of legal procedures. METHOD Using police interrogation procedures as an example, we obtained estimates from previous literature and demonstrated that racial disparities exist at each stage of legal procedures. We then used these estimates to compute and visualize expected utilities, which quantify the average long-term outcomes of interrogations for minority versus nonminority suspects. RESULTS Based on this hypothetical example, the expected utility analysis suggests that biases at various stages of interrogations could potentially lead to substantial disparities in legal outcomes between racial groups. In particular, the example shows that interrogations might yield notably worse outcomes for minority suspects than nonminority suspects because of cumulative biases that occur before, during, and after this legal procedure. CONCLUSIONS The proposed expected utility approach not only offers a valuable tool for accounting the joint impacts of multiple stages of legal procedures to quantify racial disparities but also carries important implications for how the criminal legal system could reduce such disparities. That is, the criminal legal system must seek to reduce racial biases across all stages of legal procedures rather than focusing on just one aspect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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减少刑事法律体系中的偏见：预期效用的视角。


客观 种族偏见几乎存在于刑事法律体系的各个方面，导致法律程序各个阶段（法律程序之前、期间和之后）的差异。基于预期效用理论，我们提出了一个预期效用框架来组织和量化法律程序中的种族差异。假设 与估计预期效用所涉及的参数相对应，我们假设种族偏见会出现在法律程序的不同阶段。方法以警察审讯程序为例，我们从以前的文献中获得了估计，并证明法律程序的每个阶段都存在种族差异。然后，我们使用这些估计来计算和可视化预期效用，从而量化少数族裔与非少数族裔嫌疑人审讯的平均长期结果。结果基于这个假设的例子，预期效用分析表明，审讯各个阶段的偏见可能会导致种族群体之间法律结果的巨大差异。特别是，这个例子表明，由于在这一法律程序之前、期间和之后发生的累积偏见，少数族裔嫌疑人的审讯可能会比非少数族裔嫌疑人产生明显更差的结果。结论所提出的预期效用方法不仅提供了一个宝贵的工具来衡量法律程序多个阶段的共同影响以量化种族差异，而且对刑事法律制度如何减少这种差异具有重要意义。也就是说，刑事法律体系必须寻求在法律程序的各个阶段减少种族偏见，而不是只关注某一方面。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。