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This paper examines the impact of jury racial composition on trial outcomes using a unique data set of felony trials in Florida between 2000 and 2010. We utilize a research design that exploits day-to-day variation in the composition of the jury pool to isolate quasi-random variation in the composition of the seated jury, finding evidence that: (i) juries formed from all-white jury pools convict black defendants significantly (16 percentage points) more often than white defendants and (ii) this gap in conviction rates is entirely eliminated when the jury pool includes at least one black member. The impact of jury race is much greater than what a simple correlation of the race of the seated jury and conviction rates would suggest. These findings imply that the application of justice is highly uneven and raise obvious concerns about the fairness of trials in jurisdictions with a small proportion of blacks in the jury pool. IntroductionThe Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution establishes the right of a defendant charged with a crime to a trial by an impartial jury. 1 Yet the history of American criminal justice is replete with cases where the abstract promise of jury impartiality has been called into question. Of special concern are settings where a minority member of a population is tried in a location in which few, if any, members of the same minority are likely to serve on the jury. 2 This concern has arisen repeatedly in the context of race, as blacks generally constitute a small fraction of the population, and therefore seated juries, in the majority of U.S. states and counties. Vastly unequal outcomes -the proportion of blacks in the prison population is almost four times that in the general population -along with anecdotal evidence from many cases have led numerous observers to question whether the criminal justice system treats black defendants (and victims) fairly.Despite the fundamental importance of the equal and impartial application of the law for the American criminal justice system, the empirical literature on the effect of jury racial composition on trial outcomes is sparse and flawed. Studies based on experimental evidence from "mock" trials are limited by numerous simplifications made for experimental expediency and, more fundamentally, by the substantially lower stakes compared to real criminal trials. 3 And, the few studies that examine the correlation between the composition of the seated jury and trial outcomes are problematic because the seated jury results from a non-random selection process. 4 In particular, in the vast majority of criminal trials in the United States, prosecution and defense attorneys are able to exclude a sizeable number of potential jurors in the jury pool from the seated jury without explanation through the use of peremptory challenges. As a result, even if the initial jury pool is randomly drawn, the composition of the seated jury may be correlated with the nature of the charges and evidence in the case as well as the attributes of the defendant.Given th...

This paper analyzes the influence that juvenile offenders serving time in the same correctional facility have on each other's subsequent criminal behavior. The analysis is based on data on over 8,000 individuals serving time in 169 juvenile correctional facilities during a two-year period in Florida. These data provide a complete record of past crimes, facility assignments, and arrests and adjudications in the year following release for each individual. To control for the nonrandom assignment to facilities, we include facility and facility-by-prior-offense fixed effects, thereby estimating peer effects using only within-facility variation over time. We find strong evidence of peer effects for burglary, petty larceny, felony and misdemeanor drug offenses, aggravated assault, and felony sex offenses. The influence of peers primarily affects individuals who already have some experience in a particular crime category. We also find evidence that the predominant types of peer effects differ in residential versus nonresidential facilities; effects in the latter are consistent with network formation among youth serving time close to home.

This article studies the causal effect of educational attainment on conviction and incarceration using Sweden's compulsory schooling reform as an instrument for years of schooling and a 70% sample from Sweden's Multigenerational Register matched with more than 30 years of administrative crime records. We find a significant negative effect of schooling on male convictions and incarceration; one additional year of schooling decreases the likelihood of conviction by 6.7% and incarceration by 15.5%. Though OLS estimates for females are of a similar magnitude to those for males, we find no evidence of a significant causal effect for women.

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Juvenile justice systems throughout the United States have become increasingly punitive since the 1970s. Most states have passed legislation making it easier to transfer juveniles to the criminal courts. Supporters of this "get tough" movement argue, in part, that juvenile courts are ineffective in deterring young offenders. This claim, however, is based primarily on poorly designed evaluations that do not account for the nonrandom nature of sentencing. This paper demonstrates how the institutional features of the justice system can be exploited to identify causality when true random assignment is not feasible. In particular, I capitalize on discontinuities in punishment that arise in Washington State's juvenile sentencing guidelines to identify the effect of incarceration on the postrelease criminal behavior of juveniles. The results indicate that incarcerated individuals have lower propensities to be reconvicted of a crime. This deterrent effect is also observed for older, criminally experienced, and/or violent youths. (c) 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved..

We use Swedish adoption data combined with police register data to study parent-son associations in crime. For adopted sons born in Sweden, we have access to the criminal records of both the adopting and biological parents. This allows us to assess the relative importance of pre-birth factors (genes, prenatal environment and perinatal conditions) and post-birth factors for generating parent-son associations in crime. When considering the extensive margin, we find that pre-birth and post-birth factors are both important determinants of sons' convictions and that mothers and fathers contribute equally through these two channels. At the intensive margin, prebirth factors still matter, however post-birth factors appear to dominate. In particular, adopting mothers appear to matter most for the probability that sons will be convicted of multiple crimes and/or be sentenced to prison. We find little evidence of interaction effects between biological and adoptive parents' criminal convictions. Having more highly educated adoptive parents, however, does appear to mitigate the impact of biological parents' criminality.

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