Essays on the Economics of Labor and Criminal Justice
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 caused significant increases in the early release of sentenced inmates from county jails, and that counties with greater treatment doses saw slight increases in employment and no corresponding increases in crime rates. This paper updates an earlier wave of studies of the impact of AB109 using new empirical methods and a new labor market outcomes. The third chapter examines the effect of geographic boundaries on emergency response behavior. Existing research has shown that government services vary spatially, but most research is confounded by factors that correlate with location. We employ a spatial regression discontinuity design using Dallas Police division boundaries to test differences in response times and crime clearance rates to assess a causal effect of call-for-service location on policing outcomes. Our results show meaningful differences across Dallas division boundaries in police response depending on how far the call is from the responding precinct. We estimate, for example, an increase in response time of up to two minutes for the most urgent “priority one” calls, which have a target response time of eight minutes. Given that all divisions employ a patrol model of policing, this suggests that divisions are allocating resources or engaging in management practices that produce different outcomes. We also demonstrate differences in call outcomes across divisions even after controlling for distance from the precinct, call priority and type, and key demographic indicators in a value-added analysis. This research shows important differences in public security access and outcomes for individuals depending on their proximity to policing services and area demographics.
Criminal Justice, Population Shocks, Prosecutor Descision Making, Spatial Policing, Economics
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