Recently-enacted criminal justice reform legislation reflects persistent public attention to nagging criminal law issues (it will also generate the variation that invites future empirical research). Another debate within the criminal law community pits "holistic" versus "traditional" criminal defense, both with competing empirical assumptions regarding efficacy. In a recent paper, The Effects of Holistic Defense on Criminal Justice Outcomes, James Anderson (RAND), et al. report results from a fascinating study.
The data set, while limited to Bronx County (NY), is significant. The paper exploits "an extract of all records from the DCJS Computerized Criminal History (CCH) database involving individuals arraigned within Bronx County between 2000 and the present, and supplemented these data with Bronx arraignment data from OCA. The CCH database includes all fingerprintable arrests that occur within the state of New York, and is the data source used to generate rap sheets following arrest for arraignments in the state. DCJS provided data covering over 2.8 million individual arrests involving nearly 400,000 distinct individuals." "The unit of observation is a defendant/case pairing, and we initially restrict attention to cases where arraignments occurred between 2000 and 2014 that had an initial disposition by October 2016, leaving a pool of 940,546 observations. We exclude the roughly 5% of Bronx criminal defendants who were not indigent and were represented by hired private counsel, as well as the as well as the <1% of cases where the DCJS file had missing data on counsel type.”
Complementing the data set is a clever research design that exploits a quasi-natural experiment and facilitates a helpful "holistic" versus "traditional" criminal defense comparison. “In the first half of the 2000s, the Bronx Defender shift assignments were centered on Mondays and Tuesdays, with the holistic defender covering all Monday and Tuesday shifts by 2004. In 2005, the Bronx Defenders began taking Sunday shifts, and they were temporarily moved to Thursday and Friday shifts at the end of 2005 before reverting to the prior arrangement in 2006. Beginning in 2012, the Defenders added Wednesday and Thursday shifts and began covering all Sunday and Monday shifts…. This rotating shift assignment pattern permits identification of the effects of holistic representation even when we control for day of week effects to account for the likelihood that crimes committed on particular days of the week, such as weekends, can be qualitatively different from those committed during the week.”
Key findings are described in the excerpted abstract: “This Article offers the first large-scale, rigorous evaluation of the impact of holistic representation on criminal justice outcomes. In the Bronx, a holistic defense provider (the Bronx Defenders) and a traditional defender (the Legal Aid Society) operate side-by-side within the same court system, with case assignment determined quasi-randomly based on court shift timing. Using administrative data covering over half a million cases and a quasi-experimental research design, we estimate the causal effect of holistic representation on case outcomes and future offending. Holistic representation does not affect conviction rates, but it reduces the likelihood of a custodial sentence by 16% and expected sentence length by 24%. Over the ten-year study period, holistic representation in the Bronx resulted in nearly 1.1 million fewer days of custodial punishment….”
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