“No education, no job, no plan”: An analysis of the relationship between social prognosis, nationality, race and sentencing in Germany

While courts assume the law does not allow biases based on race, the legal reality says otherwise. Non-nationals receive harsher sentences; in Germany this means more daily rates in penal fines, imprisonment rather than suspended sentences and longer prison terms. We know little about why this is so. This paper draws on data from courtroom observations and interviews with defendants from a project called “Performances and Manifestations of Institutional Racism in the Criminal Justice system”. During 8 months of fieldwork, ethnographic data from more than 300 cases of low-level offences were gathered. The court’s evaluation of the defendant’s social circumstances – the so-called “social prognosis”, is an important determinant in decision-making. We found that the factors which account for a positive assessment are often more difficult for marginalised groups to meet, resulting in more negative outcomes.