and, conditioned on having a downward departure, receive smaller reductions than whites and females". In 2005 Max Schanzenbach found that "increasing the proportion of female judges in a district decreases the sex disparity" in sentencing which he interprets as "evidence of a paternalistic bias among male judges that favors female offenders". In 2006 Ann Martin Stacey and Cassia Spohn found that women receive more lenient sentences than men after controlling for presumptive sentence, family responsibilities, offender characteristics, and other legally relevant variables, based on examination of three US district courts. In 2012 Sonja B. Starr from University of Michigan Law School found that, controlling for the crime, "men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do," and "[w]omen are…twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted", also based on data from US federal court cases. Racism and sexism Some prison reform and prison abolition supporters have argued that race and gender are both valid reasons for disparity in sentencing. In 2016, Mirko Bagaric argued that African-Americans and Indigenous Australians should receive a sentencing discount in all but the most serious of crimes, in part to offset unacknowledged biases to the opposite effect, while women should "be treated more leniently when they commit the same crime as a man" - in this case, he did not make any exception for serious offending. In the United Kingdom, Jean Corston's 2007 report planned as a "review of women with particular vulnerabilities in the criminal justice system" is described as making the case "that prisons should be scrapped for all but a tiny number of women", which Corston justified on the basis "equality does not mean treating everyone the same". She proposed "Custodial sentences for women must be reserved for serious and violent offenders who pose a threat to the public" and that overt separate sentencing for men and women could be considered after then-pending equality legislation. Some feminists argue that giving women lighter sentences is infantilizing, based on stereotyping, and incompatible with gender equality. See also Focal concerns theory Men's rights Misandry Sentencing References External links Crow, M.S., Bales, W. (2006). Sentencing guidelines and focal concerns: The effect of sentencing policy as a practical constraining on sentencing decisions. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 30(2) Rhodes, W.M., et al. (2016). Federal sentencing disparity: 2005-2012. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics. Kathryn Hopkins, Noah Uhrig, and Matt Colahan (2016) Associations between being male or