An impressive body of research has sprung up around the accusation that the American criminal justice system treats African-American suspects and defendants more harshly than their White counterparts. In order to investigate this claim, the author employed a quantitative, meta-analytical strategy to systematically and comprehensively review the available research concerning the influence of race on sentencing outcomes. In all, 71 published and unpublished studies were analyzed in terms of 5 types of sentencing outcomes: (1) length of incarceration, (2) imprisonment decisions, (3) ordinal scales of sentence severity, (4) discretionary lenience, and (5) discretionary punitiveness. The analysis was performed on the logged odds-ratio using the inverse variance method. Results indicated that independent of other measured variables, African-Americans were sentenced more harshly than their similarly situated White counterparts. In terms of policy, the findings suggested that the use of structured sentencing mechanisms were associated with smaller unwarranted sentencing disparities. Future research should focus on analyzing cases at lower levels of aggregation to avoid pooling cases from several jurisdictions. Footnotes, figure, tables, references