Research

Drug overdose deaths in the U.S. reached a record high of 107,573 in 2021, 75% of which involved opioids. In response, hundreds of police departments across the country have begun to divert individuals who possess drugs away from arrest and into substance use treatment. This paper evaluates the impact of this approach on future criminal justice system involvement as well as fatal overdose risk using arrest-level variation in diversion eligibility in Chicago between 2010-22. Drug arrest diversion primarily benefitted individuals who used narcotics every day, increased connections with substance use treatment, and reduced subsequent arrests, but had no discernible impact on fatal overdose risk. 

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.