Changing Behavior as a Prosecutor: A Qualitative Study (cancelled)

• In Event: Poster Session

Abstract

Prosecutors are tasked with reducing misconduct. In other words, they are tasked to change human behavior. There is a great body of social scientific literature on how law can change human behavior. Lawyers are not necessarily familiar with this, or trained in social sciences. Therefore, prosecutors might rely on their own assumptions about how they think that they can change behavior. This faces us with several problems. First, little is known what these assumptions are, so how prosecutors themselves think that they can change behavior and therefore reduce misconduct. And second, we do not know whether their assumptions on how to change behavior are in line with what we know from social scientific research.
To research this, 25 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with Dutch public prosecutors. These interviews will be coded and analyzed in order to answer the following research questions: “To what extent is there a misalignment between the assumptions of public prosecutors in the Netherlands on how to change behavior and social scientific empirical research, and if this misalignment exist, why does it exist?” The paper will discuss the results of the analyses and what this means for further research and practice.

Author

• Malouke Kuiper, University of Amsterdam