Emma Harrington, William Murdock III, Hannah Shaffer, and Natalia Emanuel. In Preparation. “
Biased Beliefs in the Criminal Justice System”.
Abstract
Prosecutors have considerable discretion over defendant outcomes in criminal courts and aim to apply their discretion to reserve incarceration for those who are more likely to re-offend. However, it is unclear whether they have accurate beliefs about the correlates of re-offense. In a survey of over 100 prosecutors in North Carolina, we find that prosecutors have systematically biased beliefs about how age and prior criminal history relate to re-offense. Prosecutors underestimate the likelihood of criminal re-offense among young offenders and overestimate the likelihood of criminal re-offense among those with long criminal histories. In future work, we will link these beliefs and the extent of each prosecutor’s inaccuracies to court records to investigate how prosecutors’ beliefs relate to the outcomes in their cases.
Emma Harrington, Hannah Shaffer, William Murdock III, and Natalia Emanuel. In Preparation. “
Determinants of Racial Disparities in Prosecutors’ Charging Decisions”.
AbstractWe explore to what extent institutional discrimination contributes to observed racial disparities in prosecutors' cases. To assess this, we link prosecutor survey responses to administrative records from North Carolina's Superior Court. Our survey presents prosecutors with hypothetical cases to test how prosecutors (consciously or unconsciously) respond to past actions of police and statutes that have disparate impact on black men, while holding fixed true defendant conduct. By linking our survey results to administrative data, we test whether prosecutors' responses predict their historical charging decisions. This allows us to quantify how much racial gaps in prosecutors' charging decisions are influenced by these up-stream disparities.
Emma Harrington and Hannah Shaffer. In Preparation. “
Rules and Discretion in the Criminal Justice System”.
Abstract
In many state criminal courts, guidelines prescribe mandatory sentencing for many defendants. However, discretion eliminated at sentencing may reappear in charging, as prosecutors adjust a defendant’s arrest charge to side-step mandatory sentencing rules. We assess the extent to which prosecutors behaviorally respond to sentencing rules and the beneficiaries from their discretion. Our context is North Carolina Superior Court, where an institutional feature of the sentencing guidelines gives us purchase on prosecutors’ behavioral response to these rules. At certain criminal history cutoffs, the guidelines discontinuously shift from discretionary to mandatory incarceration. We find that prosecutors are more likely to reduce the arresting charge in cases that would otherwise be subject to mandatory incarceration. In our setting, such charge reductions undo 40% of the mechanical increase in incarceration rates around these discontinuities. We find that defendants whose observable characteristics suggest a low risk of re-offense are more likely to receive charge reductions, suggesting prosecutors’ behavioral responses to the guidelines helps to reserve incarceration for those more likely to re-offend.