Racial disparities in criminal justice reflect behavioral differences

Quality and quantity of direct evidence for or against the claim — RCTs, systematic reviews, natural experiments, large cohort studies.

USSC's documented 19.1% longer federal sentences for Black men versus comparable white men, controlling for offense severity, directly contradicts a pure-behavior explanation.

Whether the proposed mechanism is valid and established — does the how make sense, or are there fundamental flaws in the causal logic?

The behavior-explains-all mechanism requires disparities to disappear once offense controls are applied; instead, the Stanford Open Policing Project shows disparities persisting at every decision point from stop through sentencing.

Degree of agreement among domain experts and relevant scientific or policy bodies — depth and quality of consensus, not just majority opinion.

Criminal justice researchers overwhelmingly reject a purely behavioral explanation, given disparities that survive rigorous offense and severity controls across multiple independent datasets.

Whether findings hold across independent studies, populations, and contexts — resistance to p-hacking and publication bias.

The persistence of controlled-for disparities replicates across the ACLU's marijuana arrest analysis, USSC sentencing data, and the 100M+ stop Stanford Open Policing Project.