Faculty Bibliography

In criminal cases, prosecutors have the discretion to adjust arresting officers’ charges and so can offset racial disparities introduced by police. Yet prior research suggests that prosecutors instead compound earlier disparities. We investigate prosecutors’ impacts on disparities using sentencing discontinuities in North Carolina, where defendants with slightly longer criminal histories face mandatory prison. Prosecutors can sidestep these mandatory-prison laws by reducing qualifying defendants’ charges. Between 1995 and 2019, Black defendants were initially less likely — but ultimately became more likely — to benefit from charge reductions that avoid mandatory prison. This reversal is driven by arrests typically initiated by police.

In criminal cases, decision-makers aim to selectively incarcerate defendants with a high risk of future violent crime. If decision-makers have more accurate beliefs about this risk, can they reduce violent crime without simply incarcerating more defendants? We survey 162 prosecutors about how violent re-arrest rates vary across defendants of different ages and with different criminal records. We link prosecutors’ beliefs to their 104,039 cases, which offices assign quasi-randomly. Prosecutors’ beliefs vary widely and predict their sentencing patterns for defendants of different ages and criminal records. Prosecutors with more accurate beliefs (by one standard deviation) reduce violent crime (by 6%) without incarcerating more defendants.

This Article presents evidence that some state prosecutors use their discretion to reduce racial disparities in criminal sentences. This finding challenges the prevailing view that prosecutors compound disparities. Given prosecutors' positions as mediators in a sequential system, this Article analyzes how prosecutors respond to disparities they inherit from the past--and interprets their impacts in light of the accumulated disparities that already exist when they first open their case files. Specifically, I estimate how the sentencing penalty for prior convictions differs by defendant race using North Carolina state court records from 2010 to 2019. I find that the increase in the likelihood of a prison sentence for an additional prior conviction was 25% higher for white than Black defendants with similar arrests and criminal records. While Black and white defendants without criminal records were incarcerated at similar rates, white defendants with records were incarcerated at significantly higher rates. And the longer the record, the greater the divergence. To understand this finding, I link an original survey of 203 prosecutors to their real-world cases. This survey-to-case linkage helps reveal how prosecutors' beliefs about past racial bias influence their decision-making. I find that the subset of prosecutors who attribute racial disparities in the criminal legal system to racial bias have lower prison rates for Black defendants with criminal records than facially similar white defendants, thereby offsetting past disparities. In concrete terms, racial disparities in North Carolina prison rates in 2019 would have increased by 20% had the state mandated equal treatment of defendants with similar case files. These findings should lead reformers to exercise caution when considering calls to limit or eliminate prosecutorial discretion. Blinding prosecutors to defendant race--a policy that jurisdictions are increasingly implementing--may inadvertently increase disparities by neutralizing the offsetting effects of some prosecutors. While race-blind charging ensures that prosecutors do not introduce new bias, it also ensures that any past bias is passed through to current (and future) decisions.

In criminal courts, prosecutors have considerable discretion over defendant’s sentencing, suggesting skilled prosecutors may be able to reduce both incarceration and future crime. Leveraging the quasi-random assignment of low-level felonies in North Carolina Superior Court, we find that prosecutors vary in their effects on both incarceration and re-offense. Since differences across prosecutors in their re-offense effects cannot be fully explained by their incarceration effects, prosecutors vary in their “skill” — the degree to which they selectively incarcerate those defendants most likely to re-offend. Indeed, prosecutors who are one standard deviation above the mean achieve a 2pp (8%) lower rate of re-offense than one would expect given their incarceration effect.