Cross-city evidence on the relationship between immigration and crime

Public concerns about the costs of immigration and crime are high, and sometimes overlapping. This article investigates the relationship between immigration into a metropolitan area and that area's crime rate during the 1980s. Using data from the Uniform Crime Reports and the Current Population Surveys, we find, in the cross section, that cities with high crime rates tend to have large numbers of immigrants. However, controlling for the demographic characteristics of the cities, recent immigrants appear to have no effect on crime rates. In explaining changes in a city's crime rate over time, the flow of immigrants again has no effect, whether or not we control for other city-level characteristics. In a secondary analysis of individual data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), we find that youth born abroad are statistically significantly less likely than native-born youth to be criminally active.     

Measuring and Explaining Charge Bargaining

Charge bargaining is a potentially important form of discretion in criminal sentencing that is obscured in many studies of sentencing outcomes. Our procedure to measure the difference in sentencing outcomes caused by plea bargain emphasizes the amount, in months, that the sentence length is reduced. Using this measure, we compare prosecutorial discretion across counties in two different states. We conclude that charge bargaining plays an empirically important role in determining sentencing outcomes. Furthermore, we find that measuring the distance (in months of prison time) moved during a charge bargain may provide a very different estimate of the discretion than is given by the rate of bargaining, which is the usual measure used. Although the rate of charge bargaining was higher in the voluntary guidelines state, its impact on sentences was greater in the presumptive guidelines jurisdiction, as predicted by Reitz (1998). We further observe a dramatic difference in predictions from shifting the case characteristics underlying the summary measure. This result reveals that distributional differences (either due to the underlying criminal activity or due to the overall level of severity of punishment) can easily obscure the inferences necessary for understanding the operation of the systems. Our finding of differential charge bargaining in these two jurisdictions should provide a caution when comparing the results of studies of disparity in sentencing across jurisdiction types.

Problem solving and youth violence: an evaluation of the Boston Gun Project

The Boston Gun Project is a problem-solving policing initiativeaimed at reducing homicide victimization among young peoplein the city of Boston. It represented an innovative partnershipbetween researchers and practitioners to assess the city's youthhomicide problem and implement an intervention intended to havepowerful impacts in the near term. In early 1996, a workinggroup representing a variety of law enforcement and social serviceagencies implemented an intervention that strategically respondedto gang violence, focused enforcement efforts on gun trafficking,and emphasized communication of the strategy to generate deterrence.The intervention is associated with a 60% decline in youth homicidevictimization (i.e., two fewer victims per month). There aresmaller declines in other measures of violence. The declinein youth homicide is sharp and occurs coincident with the introductionof the intervention. Competing hypotheses appear unable to accountfor the decline.     

What do prosecutors maximize? An analysis of the federalization of drug crimes

Recent legislation has expanded the jurisdiction of the federalgovernment over crimes that were traditionally prohibited onlyby state law. We model the decision-making process of stateand federal prosecutors, and the determinants of prosecutors'decisions to allocate drug cases to the state versus the federalsystems. Using 1991 surveys of state and federal inmates incarceratedfor drug crimes, we find that individuals who hire private attorneysand who are high-human-capital and successful in the legitimatesector are more likely to end up in the federal system. Thisis consistent with the model in which prosecutors maximize boththe payoffs from eliminating crime and their private human capital.