What Do Prosecutors Maximize? An Analysis of the Federalization of Drug Crimes
نویسندگان
چکیده
Recent legislation has expanded the jurisdiction of the federal government over crimes that were traditionally prohibited only by state law. Previous work has neglected the potentially important role of prosecutors' incentives in allocating cases to the federal and state systems. We model the decision-making process of state and federal prosecutors, and, using data from state and federal inmates incarcerated for drug crimes, we estimate empirically the importance to the federal/state jurisdictional decision of the characteristics of defendants, states' legal environments, and lawyers' labor markets. We find that individuals who hire private attorneys and who are high human capital and successful in the legitimate sector are more likely to end up in the federal system. This is consistent with the model in which prosecutors maximize both the payoffs from eliminating crime and their private human capital.
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The Effect of Federalization on the Defense Function
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