The Role of Prosecutor’'s Incentives in Creating Congestion in Criminal Courts

Review of Law and Economics, Forthcoming

39 Pages Posted: 25 Oct 2012

Date Written: October 24, 2012

Abstract

While much legal research has examined the problem of court delays and backlogs, the link between the prosecutor'’s incentives to press charges and their subsequent effect on the congestion in the criminal justice system has remained largely overlooked. To understand the implications of such decision on the court congestion, we model prosecutor’s incentives using queuing theory. We demonstrate that a benevolent decision-maker weighs the trade-off between the desire to increase the volume of cases that reach the court in order to convict the guilty and the delay costs that are due to the length of the court proceedings. Using two prosecutorial incentive schemes that have previously been identified in the literature— -- the conviction rate and the total number of convictions --— we fi…nd that a prosecutor who is acting to increase his own utility would deviate from charging the socially-desired number of cases. Following these negative results, we design a mechanism that induces the prosecutor to press charges in the socially-optimal number of cases. Also new in this paper is the methodology of using queuing theory in conjunction with issues of court delay and prosecution incentives. While thus far this tool has been widely applied in other disciplines of economics research, to the best of our knowledge, this is the …first attempt to utilize this method in issues related to court congestion.

Keywords: Law and economics, court congestion, prosecutor's incentives

Suggested Citation

Shamir, Julia and Shamir, Noam, The Role of Prosecutor’'s Incentives in Creating Congestion in Criminal Courts (October 24, 2012). Review of Law and Economics, Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2166540

Julia Shamir

Independent ( email )

Noam Shamir (Contact Author)

Tel-Aviv University ( email )

P.O. Box 39010
Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv, 69978
Israel

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