“If your town elects a Republican prosecutor, firearm homicides go down and young men have MUCH lower death rates. As it turns out, you can just choose to prosecute criminals and that saves lives!” An academic made that observation, citing a recent study by Panka Bencsik of Vanderbilt University and Tyler Giles of Wellesley College.
“We find that narrow election of a Republican prosecutor reduces all-cause mortality rates among young men ages 20-29 by 6.6%. This decline is driven predominantly by reductions in firearm-related deaths,”note professors Bencsik and Giles in their study, “Local Prosecutors and Public Health.” They add:
Legal scholars argue that local prosecutors may be the most powerful actors in the criminal justice system, yet there is a limited understanding of how different prosecutorial approaches shape community level outcomes. This paper investigates the causal relationship between approaches taken by local criminal prosecutors—also called district attorneys—and community-level mortality rates. We leverage plausibly exogenous variation in prosecutorial approaches generated by closely contested partisan prosecutor elections, a context in which Republican prosecutorial candidates are commonly characterized as “tougher on crime.” Using data from hundreds of closely contested partisan elections from 2010 to 2019 and a vote share regression discontinuity design, we find that narrow election of a Republican prosecutor reduces all-cause mortality rates among young men ages 20 to 29 by 6.6%. This decline is driven predominantly by reductions in firearm-related deaths, including a large reduction in firearm homicide among Black men and a smaller reduction in firearm suicides and accidents primarily among White men. Mechanism analyses indicate that increased prison-based incapacitation explains about one third of the effect among Black men and none of the effect among White men. Instead, the primary channel appears to be substantial increases in criminal conviction rates across racial groups and crime types, which then reduce firearm access through legal restrictions on gun ownership for the convicted.
Democratic prosecutors are also more likely to seek short sentences that fail to keep the public safe, by releasing inmates who then kill people. Criminals often commit more crimes after being released. Nationally, 81.9% of all state prisoners released in 2008 were subsequently arrested within a decade, including 74.5% of those 40 or older at the time of their release. (See Bureau of Justice Statistics, Recidivism of Prisoners in 24 States Released in 2008: A 10-Year Follow-Up Period (2008-2018), pg. 4, Table 4)).
When Italy released inmates early, that increased its crime rate a lot, according to a 2014 study in the American Economic Journal. Other studies find similar results.
Inmates who have spent many years in prison are less likely to commit crimes upon being released, but their recidivism rates are still substantial. 57.5% of federal inmates imprisoned for violence for ten years or more were arrested again within 8 years after being released, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. (See Recidivism of Federal Violent Offenders Released in 2010, pg. 33 (Feb. 2022)).
