Sonja Starr's paper critiques the growing trend of basing criminal sentences on actuarial recidivism risk prediction instruments that include demographic and socioeconomic variables. She argues that this practice violates the Equal Protection Clause and is bad policy: an explicit embrace of otherwise-condemned discrimination, sanitized by scientific language. Evidence-Based Sentencing (EBS) seeks to help judges advance the crime-prevention objectives of punishment by equipping them with criminologists' tools—recidivism risk prediction instruments grounded in regression models of past offenders' outcomes. The most distinctive feature of EBS is that it formally incorporates discrimination based on socioeconomic status and demographic categories into sentencing.

The University of Michigan Law School Law & Economics Working Papers Collection includes works-in-progress on law & economics and related subjects.

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^{Keywords: Michigan Law, Evidence-Based Sentencing and the Scientific Rationalization of Discrimination, Setember 2013, Negative, Bad Policy}

• Evidence Based Practices