TY - JOUR
T1 - Prosecutors, court communities, and policy change
T2 - The impact of internal DOJ reforms on federal prosecutorial practices*
AU - Lynch, Mona
AU - Barno, Matt
AU - Omori, Marisa
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors are grateful to Carter Hay and the anonymous reviewers, whose guidance and suggestions strengthened the article. This research was supported by Grant #93‐18‐03 from the Russell Sage Foundation and by Grant #1849089 from the National Science Foundation awarded to the first author.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. Criminology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society of Criminology
PY - 2021/8
Y1 - 2021/8
N2 - The current study examines how key internal U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) policy changes have been translated into front-line prosecutorial practices. Extending courts-as-communities scholarship and research on policy implementation practices, we use U.S. Sentencing Commission data from 2004 to 2019 to model outcomes for several measures of prosecutorial discretion in federal drug trafficking cases, including the use of mandatory minimum charges and prosecutor-endorsed departures, to test the impact of the policy changes on case processing outcomes. We contrast prosecutorial measures with measures that are more impervious to discretionary manipulation, such as criminal history, and those that represent judicial and blended discretion, including judicial departures and final sentence lengths. We find a significant effect of the policy reforms on how prosecutorial tools are used across DOJ policy periods, and we find variation across districts as a function of contextual conditions, consistent with the court communities literature. We also find that a powerful driver of changes in prosecutorial practices during our most recent period is the confirmation of individual Trump-appointed U.S. Attorneys at the district level, suggesting an important theoretical place for midlevel actors in policy translation and implementation.
AB - The current study examines how key internal U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) policy changes have been translated into front-line prosecutorial practices. Extending courts-as-communities scholarship and research on policy implementation practices, we use U.S. Sentencing Commission data from 2004 to 2019 to model outcomes for several measures of prosecutorial discretion in federal drug trafficking cases, including the use of mandatory minimum charges and prosecutor-endorsed departures, to test the impact of the policy changes on case processing outcomes. We contrast prosecutorial measures with measures that are more impervious to discretionary manipulation, such as criminal history, and those that represent judicial and blended discretion, including judicial departures and final sentence lengths. We find a significant effect of the policy reforms on how prosecutorial tools are used across DOJ policy periods, and we find variation across districts as a function of contextual conditions, consistent with the court communities literature. We also find that a powerful driver of changes in prosecutorial practices during our most recent period is the confirmation of individual Trump-appointed U.S. Attorneys at the district level, suggesting an important theoretical place for midlevel actors in policy translation and implementation.
KW - court communities
KW - policy change
KW - prosecutors
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U2 - 10.1111/1745-9125.12275
DO - 10.1111/1745-9125.12275
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85109086486
VL - 59
SP - 480
EP - 519
JO - Criminology
JF - Criminology
SN - 0011-1384
IS - 3
ER -