The Economics of Criminal Courts: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation

Abstract

UNTIL the 1960s economists made relatively few contributions to the study of criminal justice. Perhaps economists were apprehensive about the study of what appeared to be non-market activity, or, as is suggested by Gary Becker, neglect probably resulted from an attitude that illegal activity is too immoral to merit any systematic scientific attention.' Whatever the reasons for this past reluctance, economists have been increasingly willing to apply their professional tools to the study of non-traditional areas such as crime and crime prevention, and these applications have demonstrated that many aspects of crime and crime prevention can be analyzed as economic phenomena.2 Thus, by the late 1960s there was an identifiable economics of crime and crime prevention. Recently, William Landes has made a notable contribution to this emerging field of economics.3 In his Economic Analysis of the Courts, Landes demonstrated that the plea bargaining process, which is of central importance to modern jurisprudence, can be characterized as a market transaction in which the prosecutor buys guilty pleas in exchange for promises of sentence leniency. This transaction between the prosecutor and defendant determines, for any defendant, the type of disposition (trial vs. settlement) and sentence severity received if convicted. Thereby, the Landes model is