Dissertation Title: Three Essays on the Effects of Legal Reforms on Crime and Inequality

Committee: Robert Vargas (chair), Geoffrey Wodtke, Julian Go

My dissertation explores how changes in the written law can impact crime and inequality outcomes in the U.S. and Latin America. Concretely, I examine the effects of anti-gang legislation across the U.S. on crime rates, incarceration rates, and policing activity. For Latin America, I explore the impact of the region's most profound criminal justice reform, a phenomenon known as the Latin American Criminal Procedural Revolution. For both the Latin American and U.S. cases, I exploit the staggered implementation of the different legal reforms to estimate the causal effect of these changes on pre-trial detention, imprisonment rates, policing activity, prosecutorial activity, and inequality outcomes. 

Background:

My research focuses on understanding the ways the criminal justice system produces and reproduces inequality in Latin America and the United States. For my JSD dissertation, I explored the effects of the Latin American Criminal Procedural Revolution (LACPR) - a process in which more than sixty percent of Latin American countries adopted the U.S. adversarial system - in crime rates, convictions and the use of pretrial detention. For the U.S. case, I am interested in understanding the mechanism through which misdemeanor encounters reproduce class and racial stratification. Particularly, my research focuses on the consequences of implementing quality of life policing techniques in cities like New York and Chicago. Previously, I have explored the misdemeanor arrest patterns and the disparities in the cumulative risk of misdemeanor convictions and jail sentences in New York.