Home » Advisor » Bocar Ba

Category Archives: Bocar Ba

Bailing on Justice: Plea Bargain Sentencing Outcomes

by Esmé Lise Mailloux Govan

Abstract 

In 2020, over 630,000 American adults were detained in local jails each day, 74% of whom had not yet been convicted of a crime. These defendants were detained before going to court because they did not make bail. There is a large body of work documenting the negative impacts of pretrial detention on a variety of outcomes, both short term such as sentencing and long term such as labour market outcomes. However, most of these studies take place in the largest cities in the U.S., which is partly a result of data availability. Thus, it is unclear if these results replicate outside of these urban cores. This paper uses data from Berkshire, which is disproportionately rural and White, to test whether the negative effects of pretrial detention extend to these less studied areas. First, using Durham data, the negative effects of pretrial detention in urban areas that previous studies have reported are replicated. Then, using Berkshire data, the negative effects of pretrial detention are shown to not only extend to rural populations, but are in fact more severe.

Bocar A. Ba, Faculty Advisor
Jason E. Baron, Faculty Advisor

JEL classification: K14; K41; K42

View Thesis

The Case for Clemency: Differential Impacts of Pretrial Detention on Case and Crime Outcomes

By George Rateb

Abstract
About half-million of individuals in US jails are detained pretrial while legally presumed
innocent. Using data on quasi-randomly assigned bail judges in the third-largest court system in
the U.S., we study the impact of pretrial detention on defendants’ court and crime outcomes
between 2008 and 2012. We supplement our primary analysis to document patterns on bail
amounts and how they differentially impact Black defendants relative to their white and Hispanic
counterparts. Instrumental variable estimates suggest that pretrial detention increases the
likelihood of being found guilty, mainly driven by the uptake of guilty pleas, especially for
minorities. By linking court and jail data, we provide mechanistic evidence that jail time is
positively correlated with the uptake of these guilty pleas. To the best of our knowledge, these
findings have not been empirically documented due to a lack of previous data availability.

Professor Bocar Ba, Faculty Advisor
Professor Michelle Connolly, Faculty Advisor

JEL classification: C26; J15; K14

View Thesis

Patrolling the Future: Unintended Consequences of Predictive Policing in Chicago

By Jenny Jiao   

In the past decade, police departments have increasingly adopted predictive policing programs in an effort to identify where crimes will occur and who will commit them. Yet, there have been few empirical analyses to date examining the efficacy of such initiatives in preventing crime. Using police and court data from the second-largest police department in the country, this paper seeks to evaluate the pilot version of Chicago’s Strategic Subject List, a person-based predictive policing program. Using a boundary discontinuity design, I find that individuals eligible for the Strategic Subject List were 2.07 times more likely to be found not guilty of all charges in court than similarly situated individuals in the control group. Taking into account crime category heterogeneity, I find evidence that individuals previously arrested for drug crimes drive this result. This research sheds light on the potential unintended consequences of person-based predictive policing.

View Thesis

Advisors: Professor Patrick Bayer, Professor Bocar Ba | JEL Codes: K4, K42, O33

Questions?

Undergraduate Program Assistant
Matthew Eggleston
dus_asst@econ.duke.edu

Director of the Honors Program
Michelle P. Connolly
michelle.connolly@duke.edu