Randi Hjalmarsson is a labor economist by training who has ended up conducting extensive research on the economics of crime and the criminal justice system. With a PhD in economics from Yale University and currently a professor of economics at the University of Gothenburg, she has dug deep into issues such as different stakeholder impacts in the actual functioning of justice. This includes, for example, looking into research questions such as the degree to which punishment severity influences juries’ decisions to convict.
In a Probable Causation podcast, where she is interviewed by host Jennifer Doleac, Hjalmarsson gives a fascinating recount of the ingenious methodology she followed to acquire an adequate dataset for her research. Leveraging the effort of a group digital historians, she was able to access abundant eighteenth and nineteenth century sentences from the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales (commonly called the Old Bailey, after the street on which it stands). The Crown Court sitting at the Central Criminal Court deals with major criminal cases from within Greater London and in exceptional cases, from other parts of England and Wales.
Professor Hjalmarsson and her co-author Anna Bindler were able to conduct a difference in differences analysis using infrequent but highly suitable natural experiments: tracking the movement in sentencing stats around a series of dramatic legislative system changes, such as the gradual abolition, one crime at a time, of most grave sentences like death or transportation to the colonies (first to America, then paused at the time of the American Revolution, and later resumed to Australia), in an attempt to isolate their effects.
The results? The lowering of punishment levels resulted in a significant increase in guilty sentences. That is to say, jurors have historically adjusted –or betrayed– their official institutional mandate and, disregarding the strict guidelines that should inform their case behaviour, let their subjective opinion on the relative harshness of the proposed punishments play an active and critical role in their reaching a decision or guilt or innocence.
This begs the question of whether, from a societal viewpoint, we should procure enhanced compartmentalisation abilities in individuals performing different tasks, at different times, under different circumstances and requirements. Or whether, taking the opposite view, we should indeed assume that these natural compartmentalisation deficits actually act as natural balancers for potential mistakes or miscalibrations that would otherwise result from the cold and aseptic human participation in the functioning of our institutions.
Definitely an interesting debate!
