Overrepresentation of foreigners in prisons is a well-established fact in Spain. However, there is a lack of empirical studies exploring the causes of this overrepresentation. Based on focal concerns theory, this paper aims to explore one of the possible causes of this overrepresentation: sentencing disparities between Spanish and foreign citizens. For this purpose, two subsets of court records are used to study disparities in the odds of incarceration (n = 2310) and differences in the length of prison sentence (n = 1162). Due to alleged limitations of standard regression models to analyse disparities in sentencing when differences between groups are large, entropy re-weighting was used to achieve balance between group observations with regard to control variables. The analyses reveal, on the one hand that, even when controlling for relevant legal and other extra-legal factors, citizens from Africa have higher odds than Spanish citizens to be sentenced to prison. On the other hand, no differences in the length of the conviction have been found.

外国人在监狱中的比例过高在西班牙是一个公认的事实。然而，缺乏实证研究来探索这种过度代表的原因。基于焦点关注理论，本文旨在探讨这种过度代表的可能原因之一：西班牙和外国公民之间的量刑差异。为此目的，法庭记录的两个子集用于研究监禁几率的差异 ( n  = 2310) 和刑期长度的差异 ( n = 1162）。由于据称标准回归模型在分析组间差异较大时的量刑差异方面存在局限性，因此使用熵重新加权来实现组间观察与控制变量之间的平衡。分析显示，一方面，即使在控制相关法律和其他法律外因素的情况下，非洲公民被判入狱的几率也高于西班牙公民。另一方面，没有发现定罪期限的差异。