Reforming Justice under a Security Crisis: The Case of the Criminal Justice Reform in Mexico

Camilo A. Cepeda-Francese (acepeda@colmex.mx) and Aurora Alejandra Ramírez-Álvarez
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Camilo A. Cepeda-Francese: El Colegio de México

Serie documentos de trabajo del Centro de Estudios Económicos from El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Económicos

Abstract: This paper assesses how the adoption of a common-law style model affects crime rates, pre-trial detention, and judicial efficiency measures. We do this in the context of Mexico, where a judicial reform was fully implemented by 2016, both on the state and federal levels. Using a generalized synthetic control group approach (Xu, 2017) and municipality-level administrative data for the years 1997-2012, we find that the reform increased the homicide rate and was accompanied by a reduction in the use of pretrial detention for property crimes and rape, and a more rapid process for some types of crimes. The increase in the homicide rate was, nonetheless, specific to municipalities with established organized crime presence, where we observed a reduction in the capacity to effectively prosecute homicides linked to the reform. Our results describe the difficulties in implementing this kind of reform in developing countries experiencing security crises, and they contribute to the literature linking procedural justice and criminal behavior.

Keywords: Crime; Criminal Justice Reform; Generalized Synthetic Control Group; Latin America (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K14 K40 K41 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-isf, nep-lam, nep-law and nep-ure
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https://cee.colmex.mx/dts/2021/DT-2021-6.pdf (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:emx:ceedoc:2021-06

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