UC Berkeley

This dissertation investigates key aspects of the U.S. criminal justice system.

The first chapter studies different methods of providing a legal counsel to low-income criminal defendants. Most criminal defendants in the U.S. cannot afford to hire an attorney. To provide constitutionally mandated legal services, states commonly use either private court-appointed attorneys or a public defender organization. This paper investigates the relative efficacy of these two modes of indigent defense by comparing outcomes of co-defendants assigned to different types of attorneys within the same case. Using data from San Francisco, I show that in multiple defendant cases public defender assignment is plausibly as good as random. I find that defendants who have been assigned a public defenders obtain more favorable sentencing outcomes.

The second chapter investigate the causal effect of incarceration on reoffending using discontinuities in state sentencing guidelines and two decades of administrative records from North Carolina. A regression discontinuity analysis shows that one year of incarceration reduces the likelihood of committing new assault, property, and drug offenses within three years of conviction by 38%, 24%, and 20%, respectively. Incarceration sentences temporarily incapacitate offenders by removing them from society but can also influence post-release criminal behavior.

The third chapter parses the non-linear and heterogeneous effects of incarceration on post-release criminal behavior, I develop an econometric model of sentencing length and recidivism. This model model allows for Roy-style selection into sentencing on the basis of latent criminality. I propose a two-step control function estimator of the model parameters and show that our estimates accurately reproduce the reduced form effects of the sentencing discontinuities that I study. The parameter estimates indicate that incarceration has modest crime-reducing behavioral effects that are diminishing in incarceration length. A cost-benefit analysis suggests, however, that the benefit of reducing crime by lengthening sentences (through both incapacitation and behavioral channels) is outweighed by the large fiscal costs of incarceration.