Adversariality, Plea Bargaining, and Prison Population Growth: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Abstract

During the two decades after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. promoted Latin America's deepest criminal justice transformation. By the end of 2010, approximately 70% of Latin American countries had abandoned their inquisitorial system and adopted the U.S. model. In the mass- incarceration era, the U.S. expanded its adversarial model without considering the consequences in foreign penitentiary systems. Despite a large body of literature documenting the scale of imprisonment in the U.S. and its effects on inequality outcomes, we know relatively little about the U.S. impact in Latin American prisons. After the reform took place, almost every country that introduced it experienced an acceleration in incarceration rates. Almost three decades after this transformation, Latin America lives one of its majors' prison crisis, while the effect of adversariality remains empirically unexplored. In this project, I seek to advance the literature on mass-incarceration studying the consequences of the U.S. transnational agenda in one key jurisdiction -Colombia. Mainly, I will explore the effects of adversariality and introducing controversial institutions like plea bargaining into the Latin American context. To carry out this analysis, I exploit the Colombian quasi-experimental case showing that the U.S. model caused an increase of 18%-30% in Colombian incarceration rates.