The study also investigated possible legal charateristics discriminating among these groups and discrimination effects emerging independently of offenders' legal characteristics. The subjects were 550 adult male offenders undergoing felony presentence evaluation at the California Institution for Men. All decisionmakers were white males. Multivariate analyses were performed to examine sentencing recommendations. Results indicated that ethnic group membership is related to the sentencing recommendations of both clinicians and caseworkers. Though none of the correlation coefficients is extremely large, both groups of decisionmakers tend to select whites when recommending probation and blacks when recommending prison, while caseworkers show a tendency to select Mexican-Americans for punitive case dispositions. However, ethnicity is also related to criminological characteristics, and whites as a group commit the least serious offenses and have the fewest prior convictions. Discriminatory decisions favoring whites for relatively lenient case dispositions were more prevalent among clinicians and remained statistically significant for caseworkers only when criminological variables were held constant. Overall, the findings suggest that decisionmaking needs to be regulated and structured, possibly through the use of guidelines containing expected decision outcomes. Tabular data and a list of references are provided.