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Gender Favoritism among Criminal Prosecutors

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  • Stephanie Holmes Didwania

Abstract

Prosecutors enjoy wide discretion in the decisions they make but are largely unstudied by quantitative empirical scholars. This paper explores gender bias in prosecutorial decision-making. I find that male and female prosecutors exhibit small and statistically insignificant differences in their treatment of defendants overall but demonstrate relative leniency toward defendants of their own gender. Such favoritism at charging translates into a sentencing gap of roughly 5 months of incarceration for defendants who are paired with an own-gender prosecutor versus an opposite-gender prosecutor, which represents a roughly 8 percent reduction in sentence length at the mean. The estimates do not appear to be driven by differences in case assignments for male and female prosecutors.

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  • Stephanie Holmes Didwania, 2022. "Gender Favoritism among Criminal Prosecutors," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 65(1), pages 77-104.
    • Handle: RePEc:ucp:jlawec:doi:10.1086/718463
    DOI: 10.1086/718463
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    Cited by:

    1. Julia Godfrey & Kegon Teng Kok Tan & Mariyana Zapryanova, 2023. "The Effect of Parole Board Racial Composition on Prisoner Outcomes," Working Papers 2023-011, Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group.

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