Prosecutorial Reform and Local Crime Rates

Many communities across the United States have elected reform-minded prosecutors who seek to safely reduce the reach and burden of the criminal justice system. In this paper, we use variation in the timing of when these prosecutors took office across jurisdictions to empirically characterize their policy changes and estimate downstream effects on prison incarceration rates, local reported crime rates, and drug mortality rates. We find that after a reform prosecutor takes office there are consistent and often statistically significant decreases in charging and conviction rates for nonviolent misdemeanor offenses, particularly misdemeanor drug offenses, but not for violent or felony offenses. We find little to no downstream effects on prison incarceration rates and no effects on local reported crime rates or drug mortality rates. These findings suggest that the types of policies being implemented by reform prosecutors appear to be decreasing the footprint of the criminal justice system without adverse effects on public safety.