Ruptured alliances: Prosecutorial lobbying, victims’ interests and punishment policy in Illinois

Abstract

Using a combination of FOIA-requested legislative committee hearings and in-depth interviews, this manuscript investigates the work of Illinois prosecutorial lobbyists in state-level crime policy during a time of penal reform. I find that prosecutorial lobbyists are a regular and influential presence in policy discussions, advocating primarily for 'law and order' policies that expand prosecutorial discretion, even following the Great Recession. I also find that they repeatedly evoke their relationship to crime victims to frame their policy positions for a bipartisan audience. However, attention to discourse reveals that victims’ own interests regularly clash with prosecutorial discretion. These clashes create what I term discursive ruptures, or uncomfortable and surprising rhetorical fissures that emerge in what is otherwise seen as a near iron-clad political alliance. In such instances, prosecutors risk alienating a key source of their political legitimacy to protect their own discretionary authority. Beyond insight into momentary political discomfort, these ruptures suggest that the powerful and productive alliance between prosecutors and victims is neither as natural nor as robust as relational perspectives have generally assumed, unearthing fault lines in prosecutors’ unparalleled power to punish.

Prosecutors as punishers: A case study of Trump-era practices

“…While progressive prosecutors have faced significant internal and external backlash (Butler, 2022; Davis, 2019), they have had some direct impact in mitigating punishment in their jurisdictions (Mitchell et al, 2022), and they have had a modest impact in lobbying for state legislation aimed at reducing punitiveness (Hessick et al, forthcoming). Nonetheless, as a political force, prosecutors have largely fought any reform efforts that would reduce prosecutorial discretion (Degenshein, 2023; Hopwood, 2020), and those that would lessen maximum punishments or eliminate mandatory minimum punishments (Hopwood, 2020; Lynch, 2016), while continuing to lobby for more funding, fewer restraints on their power, and more severe punishments in the current reform era (Hessick et al, forthcoming; Hopwood, 2020).…”

“…A nascent line of research has also explored how reforms play out on the ground (Lerman and Mooney, 2022;Martin, 2016;Verma, 2015), including some of the downsides of reform for those subject to punishment (Cate, 2022) and the illusory impact of reform on the use of imprisonment (Beckett et al, 2018;Beckett and Beach, 2021). Prosecutors, as political actors, have figured into this narrative, as they have largely lobbied to retain discretionary power (Degenshein, 2023), or otherwise thwart reform efforts (Hopwood, 2020;Lynch, 2016). Nearly absent in punishment scholarship, however, has been empirical and theoretical engagement with the role of front-line prosecutors as facilitators and/or resistors to penal downsizing efforts.…”