Reforming Justice under a Security Crisis: The Case of the Criminal Justice Reform in Mexico

This paper assesses how the adoption of a common-law style model affects crime rates, pre-trial detention, and judicial efficiency measures. We do this in the context of Mexico, where a judicial reform was fully implemented by 2016, both on the state and federal levels. Using a generalized synthetic control group approach (Xu, 2017) and municipality-level administrative data for the years 1997-2012, we find that the reform increased the homicide rate and was accompanied by a reduction in the use of pretrial detention for property crimes and rape, and a more rapid process for some types of crimes. The increase in the homicide rate was, nonetheless, specific to municipalities with established organized crime presence, where we observed a reduction in the capacity to effectively prosecute homicides linked to the reform. Our results describe the difficulties in implementing this kind of reform in developing countries experiencing security crises, and they contribute to the literature linking procedural justice and criminal behavior.