Can exposure to a juvenile curfew increase subsequent criminal justice contact as an adult? While curfews may prevent minors from engaging in risky and illicit activity, they have the additional effect of creating a criminal record for minors who violate a curfew. These shifts in criminal justice contact during adolescence can have lasting impacts on adult contact with the criminal justice system. Using administrative court records from San Antonio, TX, I employ a regression kink design to exploit a kink in curfew exposure, based on variation in the age at which the curfew applies and the date when the curfew was enacted. Taking advantage of unique circumstances surrounding the San Antonio curfew, I separately estimate the curfew enactment effect of restricting the hours minors can be in public from the curfew enforcement effect of prosecuting curfew violations (and thus giving minors criminal records). I show that curfew enactment reduces future contact with the criminal justice system for adults between the ages of 18 and 21 by about six percent per year of exposure. At the same time, curfew enforcement increases future contact with the criminal justice system by about twelve percent. I corroborate my findings about the net impact of curfew exposure by studying a statewide Texas driving curfew, which prohibits individuals under 18 from driving after midnight. I also find suggestive evidence that curfews may contribute to racially disparate policing practices. 

A series of laws passed in the 2000s drastically limited both the physical and online presence of sex offenders as conditions of parole. In this study, I exploit state-level variation in the passage of three types of legal restrictions for sex offenders: (1) social media restrictions, requiring disclosure of all internet identifiers or banning the use of any social media site; (2) electronic monitoring that can track movement in real-time; and (3) residency restrictions preventing registered sex offenders from residing within a specified distance (e.g. 1,000 feet) of places where children congregate. 

Drug free school zones (DFSZs) increase penalties for drug crimes committed near schools or places where children gather. In this study, we utilize a novel data-set to estimate the causal effect of DFSZ enhancements on court sentencing outcomes in Nashville, TN. We exploit the variation of arrestees' location and use the instrumental variable two stage least squares estimator to study the causal effect of being charged with the DFSZ enhancement. Notably, we find that enhancement charges against eligible offenders are more likely to be applied to Black arrestees than White arrestees, leading to lasting impacts across races in sentencing outcomes.  Our estimates suggest that being charged with the DFSZ enhancement increases the likelihood of an individual being found guilty by 11 percentage points (17\%) - driven by large effects for White defendants.  The enhancement also increases sentence length for Black defendants by roughly 1.25 years. We present preliminary evidence of White defendants being offered better plea deals as the mechanism driving these results.

Bad Samaritan Laws (BSLs) impose punishment, either in the form of a monetary fine or misdemeanor offense, on citizens who fail to report a crime that they know has occurred or might be occurring.  This study evaluates the effectiveness of BSLs in Ohio and Texas at improving outcomes for reporting incidents of rape.  The study finds suggestive evidence that BSLs may increase reporting in the overall population. Furthermore, conditional on a report being made, arrest rates increase after the enactment of BSLs - an effect that is primarily  driven by incidents that occur between family members, but also by friends and neighbors.  Evidence supports a potential mechanism of BSLs increasing the probability of a witness being found, which facilitates arrests without jeopardizing the due process of law.  

California passed the Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA) in 2015, requiring all police to record and analyze all enforcement contacts with civilians.  This report utilizes RIPA data to analyze racially disparate police-civilian contact within similar neighborhoods of Los Angeles, with the aim of enhancing the LAPD's understanding of their current practices and potential avenues they could pursue to alleviate these disparities.   Using a descriptive approach, two stylized facts emerge.  First, racially disparate search rates are a result of both discretionary officer-level decisions as well as non-discretionary practices encouraged at the command-staff level.  Second, the racial composition of suspects known to the LAPD diverges from the racial composition of victims to an unexpected degree.  The optimal choice of benchmark to identify racial bias requires further investigation.  

See the full report here.  

In order to better understand the role that race or ethnicity may play in who is stopped by their officers, the California Highway Patrol (CHP) provided the California Policy Lab (CPL) with a data set on the enforcement stops (or stops to enforce potential violations of the law) made by the CHP.  In addition to enforcement stops, the CHP also collects identical data each time an officer interacts with civilians for non-enforcement reasons, including aiding a disabled motorist, responding to a crash, or other motorist services. This is the first report that we know of which utilizes non-enforcement stops to contextualize disparities in enforcement stops.  We use two generally accepted approaches to measure racially disparate policing: benchmarking and a hit rate analysis.  We find that racial disparities in stop rates generally persist across multiple benchmarks, but the degree of racial disparities is largely reduced when using non-enforcement stops as a benchmark rather than a more traditional benchmark of the residential population.  We also find that CHP officers may be more likely to stop Black and Asian drivers than White drivers engaged in otherwise similar behavior based on a modified hit rate analysis. 

See the full report here.