Crime, prosecutors, and the certainty of conviction

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. This paper tests predictions of a structural, augmented supply-of-offenders model regarding the relative effects of police, public prosecution and courts, respectively, on crime. Using detailed data on the different stages of the criminal prosecution process in Germany, empirical evidence suggests that public prosecutors and their influence on the probability of conviction play a major role in explaining the variation of crime rates, while the impact of the severity of punishment is small and insignificant.JEL Classification: K14, K41, C23

Discretionary prosecution of regulatory crimes: disproportionate emphasis and consequences to other serious crimes

“…28 First, in all baseline specifications in Table 2 (BASE Violent, BASE Theft, BASE Sexual, BASE Conv), the estimates of P a and P p are negative with high statistical significance. Note that prosecutions overall represent a stronger deterrence of crimes than arrests, as in Trumbull (1989), Mustard (2003), and Entorf and Spengler (2015). Furthermore, prosecution's deterrent power of theft is higher than other three crime categories in a relative sense.…”

Certainty and Severity of Sanctions in Classical and Behavioral Models of Deterrence: A Survey

“…In both the U.S. and European legal systems, the (high) discretionary power of the prosecutor is to determine which case should be disposed of before trial by either dismissal of the charges, or by imposing certain obligations on suspects in exchange for laying the file aside. Again referring to the German example, Entorf (2011) reports that prior to judicial decisions, a growing share of cases has already been discharged by the public prosecutor. In 2008, prosecutors were responsible for 87% of all dismissals in Germany (and judges in courts only ordered the remaining 13%), whereas this share was still at 67% in 1981 (Entorf 2011, Table 1).…”