The Role of Prosecutor's Incentives in Creating Congestion in Criminal Courts

Shamir Noam and Shamir Julia
Additional contact information
Shamir Noam: Stanford University
Shamir Julia: Northwestern University

Review of Law & Economics, 2012, vol. 8, issue 3, 579-618

Abstract: While much legal research has examined the problem of court delays and backlogs, the link between the prosecutor’s incentives to press charges and the subsequent effect on congestion in the criminal justice system has remained largely overlooked. To understand the implications of such decisions for court congestion, we model prosecutor incentives using queuing theory. We demonstrate that a benevolent decision-maker weighs the trade-off between the desire to increase the volume of cases reaching the court in order to convict the guilty and the delay costs that are due to the length of court proceedings. Using two prosecutorial incentive schemes that have previously been identified in the literature—the conviction rate and the total number of convictions—we find that a prosecutor who is acting to increase his own utility would deviate from charging the socially-desired number of cases. Following these negative results, we design a mechanism that induces the prosecutor to press charges in the socially-optimal number of cases. Also new in this paper is the methodology of using queuing theory in conjunction with issues of court delay and prosecution incentives. While thus far this tool has been widely applied in other disciplines of economics research, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to utilize this method in issues related to court congestion.

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/1555-5879.1637 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:rlecon:v:8:y:2012:i:3:p:579-618:n:9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/rle/html

DOI: 10.1515/1555-5879.1637

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Law & Economics is currently edited by Francesco Parisi

More articles in Review of Law & Economics from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().