Ethnic disparities in serious drug offending a descriptive study of Danish registry data

Abstract

This study examines ethnic disparities in the rates of criminal charges, in-out decisions, and sentence length, for persons originating from middle eastern countries, Pakistan, and Turkey (MENAP+T) (n = 24), and all other countries (n = 239), using Danish registry data from 2013-2019. Data consist of a sample of charges (n = 718,775), and a subsample of convictions (n = 286,832) for violence, property offences, and four types of drug offences: trafficking; wholesale; possession; and sale. There are large ethnic disparities in criminal justice outcomes in Denmark. Persons originating from MENAP+T countries had a 6.6 times higher rate of charges for violence, 5.1 for property offences, 5.4 for drug trafficking, 17.1 for drug wholesale, 5.4 for possession, and 7.9 higher rate for sale. Between the drug offence categories, disparities between the country groups are in a similar range for the lower-level offences, possession and sale, as the higher-level offences of trafficking and wholesale. The largest disparity in mean sentence length by offence category was violence, where sentences were 35 per cent longer, and for drug trafficking with 17 per cent. This study contributes to the existing research with a detailed exposition of differences across different drug offences and by including the in-out decision and sanction severity.