The Impact of Adversarial Criminal Justice on the Prison Population: Does a Large Prosecutorial Power in Plea Bargaining Lead to Higher Incarceration Rates?

• In Event: Institutional Corrections: Policies and Practices

Abstract

The United States is currently experiencing one of its major social crisis, that of mass incarceration. As a result of this, a recurrent academic debate has been what are the causes of prison population growth. One of the causes traditionally highlighted by the literature has been the adversarial nature of the system. According to this view, an adversarial system brings great prosecutorial power in plea-bargaining and it has been a crucial factor influencing the incarceration rates. Even though the relationship between an adversarial criminal justice and the incarceration rates has been widely discussed, there are few studies analyzing the causal relationship between these two variables. This article contributes to literature by providing an econometric study about the impact of an adversarial criminal justice on the incarceration rates. In order to do this, a natural policy experiment (the introduction of an adversarial system) implemented in a Latin-American country has been used to estimate how an adversarial system has affected the incarceration rates in the country. The results suggest that an adversarial system does not have an impact on the incarceration rates, which means that a large prosecutorial power in plea-bargaining does not necessarily lead to higher incarceration rates in the country.

Author

• Angela Zorro Medina, Yale Law School