Steven Raphael

Research Summary

In late 2014, California voters passed Proposition 47 that redefined a set of less serious felony drug and property offenses as misdemeanors. We examine how racial disparities in criminal court dispositions in San Francisco change in the years before (2010-2014) and after (2015-2016) the passage of Proposition 47. We decompose racial disparities in court dispositions into components due to racial differences in offense characteristics, involvement in the criminal justice system at the time of arrest, pretrial detention, criminal history, and the residual unexplained component. Before and after Proposition 47 case characteristics explain nearly all of the observable race disparities in court dispositions. However, after the passage of Proposition 47 there is a narrowing of racial disparities in convictions and incarceration sentences that is driven by lesser weight placed on criminal history, active criminal justice status, and pretrial detention in effecting court dispositions.

Policy Implications

The findings from this study suggest that policy reforms that scale back the severity of punishment for criminal history and active criminal justice status for less serious felony offenses may help narrow racial inequalities in criminal court dispositions. Efforts to reduce the impact of racial inequalities in mass incarceration in other states should consider reforms that reduce the weight that criminal history, pretrial detention, and active probation status has on criminal defendants’ eligibility for prison for less serious drug and property offenses.

We evaluate whether California’s state proposition 47 impacted state violent and property crime rates. Passed by the voters in November 2014, the proposition redefined many less serious property and drug offenses that in the past could be charged as either a felony or misdemeanor to straight misdemeanors. The proposition caused a sudden and sizable decline in county jail populations, a moderate decline in the state prison population, a decrease in arrests for property and drug offenses, and a wave of legal petitions filed for retroactive resentencing and reclassification of prior convictions. We make use of multiple strategies to estimate the effect of the proposition, including state-level synthetic cohort analysis, within-state event study estimates based on state-level monthly time series, and a cross-county analysis of changes in county-level crime rates that exploit heterogeneity in the effects of the proposition on local criminal justice practices. We find little evidence of an impact on violent crime rates in the state. Once changes in offense definitions and reporting practices in key agencies are accounted for, violent crime in California is roughly at pre-proposition levels and generally lower than the levels that existed in 2010 prior to a wave major reforms to the state’s criminal justice system. While our analysis of violent crime rates yields a few significant point estimates (a decrease in murder for one method and an increase in robbery for another), these findings are highly sensitivity to the method used to generate a counterfactual comparison path. We find more consistent evidence of an impact on property crime, operating primarily through an effect on larceny theft. The estimates are sensitive to the method used to generate the counterfactual, with more than half of the relative increase in property crime (and for some estimates considerably more) driven by a decline in the counterfactual crime rate rather than increases for California for several of the estimators that we employ. Despite this sensitivity, there is evidence from all methods tried that property crime increased with, a ballpark summary of five to seven percent roughly consistent with the totality of our analysis. Similar to violent crime, California property crime rates remain at historically low levels.

In this project we evaluate the application of the case management and treatment delivery practices developed under the HOPE probation strategy to pretrial individuals who are conditionally released from jail subject to criminal justice supervision.  In the jurisdiction we study (Honolulu, Hawaii), defendants on supervised release are typically monitored by pretrial officers located at the county jail.  The revocation of supervised release occurs once a defendant has failed to comply several times with a set of pre-specified conditions, including but not necessarily limited to refraining from drug use and additional criminal activity, maintaining contact with the assigned pretrial officers, and making all scheduled court dates.  The intervention we evaluate applies random drug testing in conjunction with swift, certain, consistent, and proportionate sanctions to pretrial misconduct.  That is to say, misconduct is met with quickly administered arrest and re-incarceration, yet subsequent jail spells are proportionate to the seriousness of the violation.  The intervention also includes drug treatment interventions for those who repeatedly fail drug tests (or who request treatment services) and direct interaction following each violation with the presiding judge of a court devoted to HOPE probation as well as HOPE pretrial defendants. 

Between September 2014 and August 2016, felony defendants who failed to make bail and who were granted supervised release were randomly assigned to either status-quo pretrial services or to the HOPE pretrial treatment group.  We use administrative data on drug tests, revocations, supervised release case dispositions, and criminal history records to assess whether applying HOPE to individuals on pretrial supervised release impacts various measures of pretrial misconduct, criminal case disposition, and post-disposition arrests.  Our findings are the following:

(1) HOPE treatment group members experience more pretrial supervised release revocations most of which are better characterized as modifications but fewer permanent revocations ending the supervised release term relative to control group members. 

(2) Treatment under HOPE pretrial reduced the proportion of drug tests resulting in failure.  The drug test failure rate for treatment group members was roughly 21 to 30 percent lower than the comparable failure rate observed for the control group with the difference statistically significant.

(3) HOPE treatment did not impact total jail days served between the supervised release date and the disposition date for the criminal case.  However, treatment group members serve jail days earlier in their supervised release term while control group members serve more jail days later.

(4) Average total pretrial arrests occurring after supervised release does not differ significantly between the treatment and control group.  However, treatment group members are significantly and substantially less likely to be arrested with a new criminal charge.

(5) Treatment group members are less likely to be convicted and less likely to be convicted for a felony.

(6) We do not find statistically significant effects of treatment on post-disposition arrest outcomes.

We estimate the effect of changes in incarceration rates on changes in crime rates using state-level panel data. We develop an instrument for future changes in incarceration rates based on the theoretically predicted dynamic adjustment path of the aggregate incarceration rate in response to a shock to prison entrance or exit transition probabilities. Given that incarceration rates adjust to permanent changes in behavior with a dynamic lag, one can identify variation in incarceration rates that is not contaminated by contemporary changes in criminal behavior. For the period 1978-2004, we find crime-prison elasticities that are considerably larger than those implied by ordinary least squares estimates. We also present results for two sub-periods: 1978-90 and 1991-2004. Our instrumental variables estimates for the earlier period suggest relatively large crime-prison effects. For the later time period, however, the effects of changes in incarceration rates on crime rates are much smaller.

In this paper, we investigate the potential connection between incarceration dynamics and AIDS infection rates, with a particular emphasis on the black-white AIDS rate disparity. Using caselevel data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we construct a panel data set of AIDS infection rates covering the period 1982 to 1996 that vary by year of onset, mode of transmission, state of residence, age, gender, and race/ethnicity. Using data from the U.S. Census, we construct a conforming panel of male and female incarceration rates. We use this panel data to model the dynamic relationship between the male and female AIDS infection rates and the proportion of men in the age/state/race-matched cohort that are incarcerated. We find very strong effects of male incarceration rates on both male and female AIDS infection rates. The dynamic structure of this relationship parallels the distribution of the incubation time between HIV infection and the onset of full-blown AIDS documented in the medical and epidemiological literature. These results are robust to explicit controls for (race-specific) year fixed effects and a fully interacted set of age/race/state fixed effects. Our results reveal that the higher incarceration rates among black males over this period explain the lion’s share of the racial disparity in AIDS infection between black women and women of other racial and ethnic groups. The magnitude and significance of these effects persist after controlling for measures of crack cocaine prevalence and flow rates in and out of prison. In a separate analysis, we exploit the occurrence of system-wide state prison overcrowding litigation as an instrumental variable for the flow rate of prison releases. We find short-run increases in prison release rates that were induced by final court decisions on relief of prisoner overcrowding resulted in significant increases in subsequent AIDS infection rates among women and blacks, manifesting 5-10 years following the increase of prison releases.