Report: Justice Reform and Crime Rates 2022

Overview:

Since the early 2000’s, 40 US states have passed criminal justice reform legislation, often formally called the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI). These reforms, while varying by state, aim to improve system performance while controlling costs.

Research Question:

Critics of justice reform initiatives often argue that the “softer” policies in these reforms may negatively impact public safety, with recent concerns around upticks in violent crime. As such, we analyze the relationship between criminal justice reform legislation and crime rates.

Data & Method:

We use publicly available data on crime rates between 2000 and 2020 from the FBI uniform crime report to compare states that have passed justice reform legislation to states that have yet to pass such reform. Specifically, we use a simple staggered difference-in-difference approach to study the aggregate effect of these reforms on property, violent, and homicide specific crime rates. Results: We find no statistical evidence that criminal justice reform legislation has caused increases in property, violent, or homicide crime rates when comparing as a group, justice reform states to non-reform states.

Takeaways: 

We find no statistical evidence that criminal justice reform legislation has caused increases in property, violent, or homicide crime rates when comparing states that have passed these reforms to those that have not. We further find a moderate and negative relationship between property crime rates and household income, and a weaker negative relationship between income, violent, and homicide crime rates. These findings should be interpreted with caution and should be seen as "insights" to the complex nature that make up crime rates.

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