A growing movement of local prosecutor candidates running for office with clear "reform" agendas (e.g., decriminalization of various drug laws through express non-enforcement, deincarceration, etc.) assumes the efficacy of the ballot box as an instrument of policy reform. Such a movement, however, risks a collision with received academic wisdom that local prosecutor elections are little more than "empty exercises" owing to an enormous "incumbency advantage." In a recent paper, Picking Prosecutors, Carissa Hessick (UNC) and Michael Morse (Harvard--Govt.) submit the received academic assumption to data. The data include prosecutor election results drawn from 2,314 separate districts across 45 states during the 2014 (or 2016) election cycle.
While largely descriptive, what they find includes the expected as well as the unexpected. Consistent with the "received wisdom," Hessick and Morse find that "incumbent prosecutors rarely face challengers and almost always win." One complicating wrinkle, however, is that the "degree of [prosecutor] incumbent entrenchment" is a function of an incumbent's time in office. Finally, one surprise is the salience of geography: or, more specifically, "a stark divide between rural and urban prosecution." A summary of this point is described in the excerpted abstract (below).
"Urban areas are more likely to hold a contested election than rural areas. Rural areas, in which very few lawyers live, rarely hold contested elections and sometimes are not able to field even a single candidate for a prosecutor election. The results suggest that the nascent movement to use prosecutor elections as a source of criminal justice reform may have success, at least in the short term. But elections are, as of now, not a likely source of reform in rural areas—the very areas where incarceration rates continue to rise."
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