Poster #5 - Parole Eligibility Reform and the Bargaining Shadow:

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

Over 95 percent of criminal convictions in the United States result from guilty pleas, and these bargains are struck in the shadow of the sentencing rules that would apply at trial. A large literature has studied how mandatory minimum sentence lengths shape this shadow, but the shadow depends not only on how long someone is sentenced but on how long they actually serve. No study has tested whether changing parole eligibility rules propagates backward into plea bargaining.

I study this question using Iowa's House File 2064, which reduced the share of sentence that must be served before parole eligibility from 70 to 50 percent for nonviolent drug felonies, effective July 2017. The reform did not change statutory sentences, offense classifications, or sentencing guidelines. It was a purely back-end reform that changed when defendants could leave prison without altering the sentence on paper.

I use administrative court records from the Iowa Judicial Branch covering 125,197 felony charges filed between 2015 and 2020, linking original charges to adjudications and sentences to observe the full case resolution pipeline. I supplement this with prosecutor and defense attorney names scraped from the Iowa Courts Online portal. The primary identification strategy is a difference-in-differences comparing drug felonies to non-drug felonies, supported by event studies, placebo tests, a regression discontinuity, and an alternative comparison group of drug misdemeanors.

I find that the reform increased guilty plea rates by 3.1 percentage points and charge reduction rates by 4.8 percentage points, while reducing dismissals and case processing time. Sentence lengths were not significantly affected, confirming that the reform operated through the bargaining channel rather than through judicial sentencing behavior. A structural bargaining model shows that the drug trial penalty collapsed from 400 to 116 days. The effects vary sharply by race: guilty plea and charge reduction responses move in opposite directions for white and Black defendants, suggesting the reform weakened prosecutorial leverage that was applied differently across racial groups. Prosecutor fixed effects explain more outcome variance than judge fixed effects for the margins most affected by the reform. The reform increased 3-year recidivism by 3.4 percentage points, concentrated where plea bargaining did not respond, isolating the incapacitation channel. Prison savings of roughly $67 million per year dwarf the fiscal cost of increased recidivism.

These findings demonstrate that back-end sentencing reforms cast a long shadow forward into plea bargaining, that the shadow is not race-neutral, and that prosecutors rather than judges drive the adjustment. The results have implications for the design of sentencing reform and for understanding how parole rules shape racial disparities in case processing.

Author

• Jake Anderson, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author