The Criminal Justice System should be inexpensive, speedy and efficient. This is essential for the smooth growth of the society as it is the primary duty of the state to administer inexpensive and speedy justice to its subjects. In Pakistan the criminal justice system has become expensive and...

I study how voluntary disclosure of information affects outcomes in plea bargaining. A prosecutor negotiates a sentence with a defendant who privately knows whether he is guilty or innocent. The prosecutor can gather evidence regarding the defendant's type during negotiations, and a trial...

This paper presents a model of prosecutors' decision-making processes in which prosecutors (both federal and state) internalize some of the benefits of reducing crime, but also care about developing their own human capital. Since U.S. attorneys make their decision first, they have the...

This paper investigates the relationship between the franchise and law enforcement practices using evidence from the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. We find that, following the VRA, black arrest rates fell in counties that were both covered by the legislation and had a large number of newly...

Racial minorities are disproportionately imprisoned in the United States. This disparity is unlikely to be due solely to differences in criminal behavior. Behavioral science research has documented that prosecutors harbor unconscious racial biases. These unconscious biases play a role whenever...

Critics of plea bargaining have long contended that it has an innocence problem - that the imbalanced and coercive nature of plea negotiations can induce even innocent defendants to plead guilty. While laboratory studies confirm that innocent individuals can indeed be induced to plead guilty,...

Objectives: Government officials use criminal records as proxies for past conduct to decide who and how to investigate, arrest, charge, and punish. But those records may be racially biased measures of individual behavior. This paper develops a theoretical definition of bias in criminal records...