prosecutoRial reform initiative

Prosecutors play a vital role in the criminal justice system. After an arrest, prosecutors have numerous choices to make regarding whether and how to pursue prosecution of an offense. Yet we know little about the effects of these decisions on community safety.

With the support of the William T. Grant Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Arnold Ventures, we are working with several large district attorney’s offices to understand the causal impacts of alternative prosecution choices on public safety outcomes.

Our recent article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics reports the first estimates of the causal effects of misdemeanor prosecution on defendants’ subsequent criminal justice involvement. We leverage the as-if random assignment of nonviolent misdemeanor cases to Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs) who decide whether a case should be prosecuted in the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts. These ADAs vary in the average leniency of their prosecution decisions. We find that, for the marginal defendant, nonprosecution of a nonviolent misdemeanor offense leads to a 53% reduction in the likelihood of a new criminal complaint and to a 60% reduction in the number of new criminal complaints over the next two years. These local average treatment effects are largest for defendants without prior criminal records, suggesting that averting criminal record acquisition is an important mechanism driving our findings. We also present evidence that a recent policy change in Suffolk County imposing a presumption of nonprosecution for nonviolent misdemeanor offenses had similar beneficial effects, decreasing the likelihood of subsequent criminal justice involvement. (ARTICLE HERE)

Press: Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Washington Post, WGBH, WBUR, Commonwealth Magazine, Marginal Revolution, Radio Boston, The Codcast (Commonwealth Magazine podcast), NYU Release, NYU News, Law360, TIME, Reasons to be Cheerful, Probable Causation, New York Times, Atlantic

We are now working with a number of district attorneys’ offices to replicate and extend these findings.