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Full-Text Articles in Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance
Police Frisks, David S. Abrams, Hanming Fang, Priyanka Goonetilleke
Police Frisks, David S. Abrams, Hanming Fang, Priyanka Goonetilleke
All Faculty Scholarship
The standard economic model of police stops implies that the contraband hit rate should rise when the number of stops falls, ceteris paribus. We provide empirical corroboration of such optimizing models of police behavior by examining changes in stops and frisks around two extraordinary events of 2020 - the pandemic onset and the nationwide protests following the killing of George Floyd. We find that hit rates from pedestrian and vehicle stops generally rose as stops and frisks fell dramatically. Using detailed data, we are able to rule out a number of alternative explanations, including changes in street population, crime, police …
Rationing Criminal Justice, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas
Rationing Criminal Justice, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas
All Faculty Scholarship
Of the many diagnoses of American criminal justice’s ills, few focus on externalities. Yet American criminal justice systematically overpunishes in large part because few mechanisms exist to force consideration of the full social costs of criminal justice interventions. Actors often lack good information or incentives to minimize the harms they impose. Part of the problem is structural: criminal justice is fragmented vertically among governments, horizontally among agencies, and individually among self-interested actors. Part is a matter of focus: doctrinally and pragmatically, actors overwhelmingly view each case as an isolated, short-term transaction to the exclusion of broader, long-term, and aggregate effects. …