Essays on the Economics of Labor and Criminal Justice
type: CreativeWork
description: With a goal of safer communities, the United States Criminal Justice System has undergone substantive legislative reform to service delivery in the past decade. These reforms have prompted a demand to analyze the benefits and potential unintended consequences of enacted and proposed policies. Using Applied Microeconomic methodology I examine three distinct yet interconnected features of the criminal justice system: prosecutors, county jail officials, and emergency service responders. In the first essay I evaluate how reclassifying felony crimes to less severe misdemeanors impacts a defendants’ recidivism likelihood. Through a causal framework leveraging the quasi-random assignment of review prosecutors to cases in a Californian County, I assess how these severe filing decisions impact defendants differently by age, race, and gender. We find that a more severe filing decision increases recidivism likelihood across all crime types, ceteris paribus. This effect is driven by the experience of the prosecutor making the initial filing decision, rather than by any specific defendant characteristic. The second chapter explores the impacts of increased supervisory burdens on county jail systems on the early release of inmates, crime, and employment. The institutional context for this study is California Public Safety Realignment, which was implemented through the passage of Assembly Bill 109 (AB109) in October 2011. AB109 shifted supervision of offenders convicted of certain non-serious, non-violent, and non-sexual offenses (1170(h) offenders) from state prisons to county jails. We leverage quasi-random variation across California counties in the pre-AB109 jail capacity and number of 1170(h) offenders assigned to local supervision to measure the average causal response of AB109 on jail systems and local communities, using a difference-in-difference with continuous treatment identification strategy. We find that increases in inflows of 1170(h) offenders resulting from AB109 c…
abstract: With a goal of safer communities, the United States Criminal Justice System has undergone substantive legislative reform to service delivery in the past decade. These reforms have prompted a demand to analyze the benefits and potential unintended consequences of enacted and proposed policies. Using Applied Microeconomic methodology I examine three distinct yet interconnected features of the criminal justice system: prosecutors, county jail officials, and emergency service responders. In the first essay I evaluate how reclassifying felony crimes to less severe misdemeanors impacts a defendants’ recidivism likelihood. Through a causal framework leveraging the quasi-random assignment of review prosecutors to cases in a Californian County, I assess how these severe filing decisions impact defendants differently by age, race, and gender. We find that a more severe filing decision increases recidivism likelihood across all crime types, ceteris paribus. This effect is driven by the experience of the prosecutor making the initial filing decision, rather than by any specific defendant characteristic. The second chapter explores the impacts of increased supervisory burdens on county jail systems on the early release of inmates, crime, and employment. The institutional context for this study is California Public Safety Realignment, which was implemented through the passage of Assembly Bill 109 (AB109) in October 2011. AB109 shifted supervision of offenders convicted of certain non-serious, non-violent, and non-sexual offenses (1170(h) offenders) from state prisons to county jails. We leverage quasi-random variation across California counties in the pre-AB109 jail capacity and number of 1170(h) offenders assigned to local supervision to measure the average causal response of AB109 on jail systems and local communities, using a difference-in-difference with continuous treatment identification strategy. We find that increases in inflows of 1170(h) offenders resulting from AB109 c…
author: Mueller, Spencer
keywords: Criminal Justice, Population Shocks, Prosecutor Descision Making, Spatial Policing, Economics
date published: 2024-01-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:41:01Z
provider: Claremont Graduate University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Claremont Graduate University