The Socioeconomic Consequences of Misdemeanor Conviction

• In Event: Work, Crime, and the Consequences of Criminal Records: Causal Evidence on Labor Market Impacts

Abstract

Multiple local governments in the United States have reduced the rate at which they prosecute and convict certain types of misdemeanor offences but there is limited evidence on the social impacts of such policies. In this paper, we provide evidence on the impacts of misdemeanor prosecution in the United States on a broad swath of socioeconomic outcomes of defendants and their families, including criminal recidivism, labor market outcomes, social safety net usage, mortality, and mental well-being. We combine a rich linkage of administrative and survey data available through the Federal Statistical Research Data Center infrastructure with two complementary research designs. First, we estimate event studies to document how employment, earnings, and poverty status evolve around misdemeanor charges and convictions for defendants in 11 states and examine the extent to which these effects vary across states. Second, we estimate the causal impact of a misdemeanor conviction (relative to being charged) by combining natural experiments from seven counties across five states. These include counties in Arizona (Pima), Florida (Orange), North Dakota (Williams), Virginia (Newport News City), and Wisconsin (Dane, Milwaukee, and Outagamie counties). Each natural experiment yields a regression discontinuity design generated by unanticipated budget cuts (either to District Attorney or Court systems) or changes in prosecutorial priorities that reduced misdemeanor conviction rates. We use variation in the estimated characteristics of the marginal defendant across counties to identify observable characteristics associated with adverse impacts of a misdemeanor conviction. Finally, we cast our causal estimates in the Marginal Value of Public Funds framework to calculate the welfare effects of misdemeanor convictions under a range of assumptions. The sensitivity analyses for the welfare calculations incorporate uncertainty in the estimates of costs of enforcement, victim costs as well as potential underreporting of criminal activity and the role of any general deterrence generated by misdemeanor prosecution.

Authors

• James Reeves, University of Colorado Denver
  Presenting Author

• Nikhil Rao, University of Michigan Ann Arbor
  Non-Presenting Co-Author