The Laboratory for Comparative Social Research announces the next regular seminar, which will be held in St. Petersburg (prospekt Rimskogo-Korsakova, 47, room 301) on April 17th at 6 p.m. Vadim Volkov (Head of the Research Institute for the Rule of Law, European University at St. petersburg; A. S. Muromtsev Professor of Sociology at the European University at St. Petersburg) will deliver a report on “Socioeconomic Status and Sentencing Disparities: Evidence from Russia’s Criminal Courts”. The discussant is Kirill Zhirkov (LCSR, research fellow).

This paper contributes to the sociological research of sentencing disparities. Using the dataset consisting of 1.5 million individual decisions of criminal courts of the Russian Federation, the study focuses on the influence of socio-economic status of defendants on decisions to acquit, imprison, suspend imprisonment as well as on the severity of punishment. The regression analysis shows strong and consistent social inequalities. The system of criminal repression is targeted mostly against socially marginal and lower status strata (prisoners, unemployed, manual workers) which constitute the absolute majority of defendants and are punished more harshly than representatives of the upper strata. Besides that, the study reveals another dimension of conflict: private entrepreneurs receive more severe punishments than public officials, especially for white-collar crimes. To make initial assumptions about the ways these regularities are produced at the interaction level, the study uses interviews with judges and results of the original survey.

Everyone interested is invited!

Working language is English.

Videoconference with Moscow office of the LCSR (Kochnovskiy Pr. 3, room 625) will be provided. Also after the seminar a videotape will be put up after the summary of the presentation.

Guests from outside the HSE are invited to make a request for a pass to the building in Moscow to Anastasia Dubova (adubova@hse.ru) by 11 am of the seminar's day. Guests from St. Petersburg are free to enter the building.