The Effects of Citations in Lieu of Arrests: Evidence from Maryland

• In Event: Economics of Crime: Arrest & Sentencing

Abstract

More than two-thirds of the jailed population in the United States is detained pretrial. Pretrial detention imposes substantial fiscal and social costs, including an increased likelihood of conviction and reduced employment (Dobbie et al., 2018). In response, state and local governments have increasingly pursued bail reform through policies such as automatic release programs, judicial risk assessment tools, and the elimination of cash bail for selected offenses. Yet these reforms generally operate only after an individual has already been arrested and booked into jail. A potentially overlooked policy lever is the use of criminal citations in lieu of arrest. Citations formally charge an individual with a criminal offense while allowing them to avoid custodial arrest and jail admission altogether.
This paper examines the consequences of replacing arrests with criminal citations for defendant outcomes and subsequent criminal charges. I use web-scraped Maryland court records and implement a difference-in-discontinuities design that exploits a January 1, 2013 policy change encouraging officers to issue criminal citations for low-level offenses. I find that the reform substantially increased the use of citations. Among all citation-eligible defendants, the policy increased citations by 59.7 percent, while among citation-eligible first-time defendants, citations increased by 49.0 percent. These changes translated into large reductions in pretrial detention, with reduced-form estimates indicating declines of 31.7 percent among all eligible defendants and 45.0 percent among eligible first-time defendants. I also find meaningful effects on other defendant outcomes. Among first-time defendants, failure-to-appear rates rise by 13.5 percent, although this estimate is only marginally statistically significant. I find little evidence that the policy changed overall recidivism, measured as any subsequent case filing within two years of the defendant’s first observed case. However, I do find a 25 percent increase in pretrial crime, defined as a subsequent case filed before disposition of the initial case.
I also document unintended consequences of the reform through spillover effects on defendants whose offenses were not eligible for citation. Among both all defendants and first-time defendants charged with ineligible offenses, pretrial detention increased by 8.0 percent and 8.7 percent, respectively. These spillovers largely offset the detention reductions among eligible defendants, suggesting that citation reform may reallocate jail contact rather than meaningfully reduce it overall.

Author

• Guthrie Scoblic, University of Missouri
  Presenting Author