The WODC Research and Documentation Centre; its Past and Current Research

This paper describes a number of past and present research projects carried out by or in assignment for the WODC Research and Documentation Centre of The Netherlands Ministry of Justice. As an introduction, we briefly describe how the WODC came into existence, and how it evolved over the years. We highlight a number of studies and themes that were focused on in the past, and we describe in more detail a number of on-going projects.We end by outlining the WODC's plans for the future.     

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.