The study, titled Prosecutor Politics: The Impact of Election Cycles on Criminal Sentencing in the Era of Rising Incarceration, was published on September 17 in the Journal of Public Economics. Okafor examined the period from 1986 to 2006, the years in which the United States prison system grew faster than at any point on record. The findings indicate that election years increased both per capita admissions to state prisons and the total number of months defendants were sentenced to serve, with the effects statistically significant across multiple comparison strategies. Admissions were approximately 3 percent higher in election years than in all non-election years, and 4.3 percent higher than in the year immediately preceding an election. Months sentenced showed a parallel pattern, rising about 3 percent in election years and 4.0 percent relative to the prior year.

To understand why these numbers matter, it helps to appreciate the institutional position of the district attorney. Okafor compiled the names of more than 4,200 district attorneys who held office during the study period, drawing on the National Directory of Prosecuting Attorneys. He chose to focus on prosecutors because they occupy a uniquely powerful chokepoint in the criminal legal system: they decide whether to charge an individual at all, what specific charges to file, how to negotiate plea bargains, what sentence length to recommend, and whether cases should be dropped entirely. Unlike judges, whose discretion is often constrained by sentencing guidelines, or legislators, who act collectively, a single elected prosecutor can shift the punitive output of an entire county through routine, largely invisible decisions.

The data infrastructure behind the study is considerable. Sentencing information across nearly 40 states came from the National Corrections Reporting Program, an offender-level dataset that records admissions to state prisons. Importantly, Okafor counted admissions to state prisons rather than jails, and he measured admissions rather than total prison populations, a design choice that isolates the flow of new bodies into the system from the slower-moving stock of people already incarcerated. Election data were sourced from states, counties, and other archives, while characteristics of the prosecutors themselves were drawn in part from the Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections, known as DIME. By aligning these datasets, Okafor was able to estimate how the timing of elections altered prosecutorial decision-making, holding constant the underlying crime environment.

The historical context is essential to interpreting the results. In the 1970s and earlier, the number of incarcerated Americans rose and fell in tandem with wars, depressions, and economic fluctuations, tracking broader social turbulence. But as new jails and prisons opened throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the number of prisoners soared regardless of what the crime rate was doing. The 1990s stand as the most punitive decade on record. During the War on Drugs of the 1980s and through the passage of the 1994 Crime Bill, public sentiment about crime grew markedly more punitive, and politicians at every level competed to present themselves as tough on crime. Okafor argues that district attorneys, as elected officials embedded in this climate, may have felt parallel incentives to pursue crime more aggressively precisely when their jobs were on the line.

The study’s interpretation of this pattern is carefully worded. Okafor describes the evidence as consistent with prosecutors having responded to perceived voter preferences, rather than proving a direct causal mechanism of opportunistic pandering. Yet the normative implications are hard to escape. District attorneys, he notes, are often considered the most influential person in the entire criminal legal system, and one of their core professional responsibilities is consistency: an office should charge and make plea offers the same way in an election year as in any other year. When the timing of an election measurably shifts sentencing outcomes, that consistency appears to break down in ways that track the political calendar rather than the facts of individual cases.

Okafor also draws a sharp distinction between the obligations of a prosecutor and those of other elected officials. Some observers argue that public-elected officials are simply supposed to do what their constituents want, and in many domains of governance that principle is uncontroversial. But a prosecutor’s role, he contends, is fundamentally different from that of a president or senator. Pointing to the American Bar Association Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which describe the prosecutor as bearing the responsibility of a minister of justice and not simply that of an advocate, Okafor frames the question as one of professional ethics rather than mere political preference. Is justice defined purely by public opinion, he asks, or should it rest on more stable, timeless standards? His own view is that prosecutors must administer justice while remaining accountable to the public, but with the recognition that a voting majority cannot singularly define what is just.

The heterogeneity in the results adds another layer of analytical interest. The election-year effects were largest in the South and in Republican-leaning counties, suggesting that the electoral incentive to escalate punishment was strongest where constituents were most punitive. Equally telling, the effects shrank as national support for harsher punishment softened after the mid-1990s. This temporal sensitivity implies that prosecutors were not mechanically punitive regardless of context; rather, their behavior tracked the prevailing ideological winds. As the national consensus on crime began to moderate, the electoral premium on aggressive prosecution diminished, and the election-year spike in prison admissions correspondingly receded. The finding suggests that prosecutorial behavior functions as a kind of barometer of public sentiment, amplifying shifts in opinion into measurable changes in incarceration.

For scholars of mass incarceration, the study helps answer a persistent puzzle: why prison populations continued to climb even as crime rates fell. If elected prosecutors escalated charging and sentencing in response to voter preferences, then the decoupling of incarceration from crime becomes less mysterious. The electoral calendar itself becomes a driver of penal severity, one that operates independently of crime trends, policy reforms, or judicial decisions. The 63,000 additional admissions attributable to election years are not the product of any single statute or Supreme Court ruling; they are the aggregate residue of thousands of prosecutors making thousands of marginally harsher decisions in the years their jobs were at stake.

Okafor hopes the findings will redirect attention as the United States approaches another midterm election cycle. Efforts to change public attitudes toward punishment, he argues, deserve as much attention as efforts to change policies or officeholders, because the evidence suggests that public opinion itself is transmitted into incarceration through the incentives facing elected prosecutors. Collective approaches to shifting hearts and minds around punishment, he concludes, may be as important as technocratic approaches to public policy when it comes to improving the criminal legal system and wider society. In a nation that still incarcerates more people than any other country, the study is a reminder that the road to prison often begins not in a legislature or a courtroom, but at the ballot box, in county races most voters barely notice.

Subject of Research: The effect of district attorney election cycles on prison admissions and sentencing during the era of rising incarceration in the United States

Article Title: Prison admissions rose 3% in district attorney election years during 'tough on crime' era

Article References: Prison admissions rose 3% in district attorney election years during 'tough on crime' era. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: district attorneys, prison admissions, mass incarceration, election cycles, prosecutorial discretion, tough on crime, Journal of Public Economics, Northwestern University, sentencing, criminal justice, public opinion, 1994 Crime Bill

The standard approach to testing the liberation hypothesis has been regression-based. Researchers build statistical models of sentencing outcomes, include measures of case severity, and test whether the effect of race or sex on punishment grows stronger as severity weakens, typically through interaction terms. If the coefficient linking defendant race to sentence length is larger in low-severity cases than in high-severity cases, the finding is taken as evidence of liberation. Holmes and Arrigo do not dispute that these coefficients answer a real question. They simply point out that it is not the question Kalven and Zeisel asked. The original theory was about what explains disagreement, not merely about how large a particular effect happens to be in one setting compared with another.

The distinction the authors draw is between effects and contributions. A regression coefficient can tell us, for example, that the odds of a judge-jury disagreement are twice as high when a defendant appears sympathetic than when the defendant does not. What it cannot tell us is how much of the overall variation in disagreements is actually accounted for by sympathy compared with the strength of the evidence. Two variables can have identical coefficients yet contribute very different shares of explained variance, depending on how much they vary and how they correlate with everything else in the model. Effect size and explanatory power are related but distinct quantities, and a theory about the sources of judicial discretion, the authors contend, is fundamentally a theory about explanatory power.

To capture that second quantity, Holmes and Arrigo turn to variance decomposition, a family of techniques borrowed from economics, psychology, and statistics that partition a model’s explained variance among its predictors. The study employs two such methods. Dominance analysis, adapted for logistic regression, determines the relative importance of predictors in the decision to incarcerate by comparing each variable’s contribution across all possible reorderings of the model. Shapley value decomposition, rooted in cooperative game theory, assigns each predictor its average marginal contribution to the model’s R-squared across every possible subset of predictors. These approaches are computationally demanding. With 26 variables, a complete Shapley decomposition would require estimating more than 67 million submodels, a burden the authors managed by computing individual contributions for key independent variables while grouping control variables.

The empirical setting is the federal sentencing system, using data from the United States Sentencing Commission. The authors exploit a structural feature of the federal guidelines: the sentencing table’s zones, labeled A through D, which impose progressively tighter constraints on judicial discretion as case severity rises. Zone A cases, the least serious, permit probation and give judges wide latitude, with incarceration imposed roughly 43 percent of the time. Zone D cases are so severe that imprisonment is essentially mandatory, with incarceration rates near 96 percent. By estimating separate models within each zone, the researchers create a natural severity spectrum across which to compare both the effects and the contributions of extralegal factors, sidestepping the interpretive distortions that arise when predicted probabilities are transformed through the nonlinear sigmoid function at very different base rates.

The results deliver the study’s central punchline. When the authors ran conventional regression tests, asking whether the effect of race, ethnicity, sex, or citizenship on sentencing outcomes was moderated by case severity, the pattern expected under the liberation hypothesis was largely absent. But when they decomposed the variance, asking whether the contribution of extralegal factors to explained variation in sentencing grew as severity declined, evidence consistent with liberation emerged. In other words, the two inquiries, which many researchers have treated as interchangeable, produce different answers, and only the variance-based inquiry finds support for the theory. A variable’s coefficient can stay flat across the severity spectrum even as its share of explained variance shifts substantially, because contributions depend on the full covariance structure of the model, not on any single slope.

The technical choices behind this finding deserve attention in their own right. The authors restricted their sentence-length models to cases receiving prison time, noting that coding non-prison sentences as zero months would create heterogeneous masses at zero across zones, conflating the incarceration decision with the length decision and corrupting comparisons between zones. They also declined to include a Heckman selection correction in the length models because the correction term was substantively collinear with legally relevant variables such as pre-sentence detention, a problem documented in prior methodological work. All models were interpreted on a common log-odds scale rather than as predicted probabilities, precisely because the sigmoid transformation would compress marginal effects differently in low-incarceration Zone A than in near-certain-incarceration Zone D, undermining interpretive consistency.

What does this mean for our understanding of American courts? If the liberation hypothesis survives only under the contribution framing, then the mechanism Kalven and Zeisel described, in which doubts about evidence free decision-makers to follow sentiment, is best understood as a claim about what drives variation in punishment, not about how much any demographic characteristic changes the average sentence. That reframing has practical consequences. A small coefficient for race in a low-severity zone could still reflect a meaningful share of the discretion exercised in those cases, while a statistically significant interaction term might reflect little explained variance at all. Policymakers seeking to rein in unwarranted disparity would therefore want to know not just whether disparities exist in lenient cases, but how much of the discretionary variation those disparities actually occupy.

The study also carries a broader methodological message for criminology and the social sciences generally. Regression coefficients have long been the default currency of quantitative testing, and interaction terms the default tool for moderation. Holmes and Arrigo join a growing literature, including recent work applying variance decomposition to inequality of opportunity, arguing that relative importance analysis should supplement rather than replace conventional regression. Their demonstration that a classic criminological theory changes its empirical verdict depending on which question is asked is a vivid case study in why the choice of statistical lens is itself a theoretical commitment. As sentencing researchers continue to debate when and whether race, sex, and citizenship shape punishment, the liberation hypothesis may need to be re-litigated, this time in the currency of explained variance.

Subject of Research: Testing the liberation hypothesis in federal sentencing using variance decomposition methods

Article Title: Using Variance Decomposition to Test Criminal Justice Theory: A Redeliberation of the Liberation Hypothesis

Article References: Holmes, B., & Arrigo, S. R. (2026). Using Variance Decomposition to Test Criminal Justice Theory: A Redeliberation of the Liberation Hypothesis. American Journal of Criminal Justice. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-026-09950-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12103-026-09950-y

Keywords: liberation hypothesis, sentencing, variance decomposition, Shapley values, dominance analysis, federal courts, racial disparity, judicial discretion, criminology, United States Sentencing Commission, case severity, extralegal factors

Penal populism first entered the scholarly vocabulary through the work of criminologist Anthony Bottoms, who described populist punitiveness as one of the main forces operating within contemporary criminal justice systems. The term captured how politicians, perceiving a deeply punitive public, pursue harsh penal policies for their own political gain. Later scholars broadened the concept. John Pratt described populism as a fundamental shift in the axis of penal power under the conditions of late modernity, while Mark Fenwick showed in the Japanese context that penal populism can also produce non-punitive policies, driven by an unmet demand for justice and security. What unites these accounts is the way penal policy becomes a reactive undertaking, supported not by evidence of effectiveness but by emotional resonance.

The authors illustrate the pattern with three contemporary cases. In the United States, following the murder of political activist Charlie Kirk, President Trump argued on Fox News for what he called quick trials, complaining that criminal proceedings stretching over seven or eight years allow defendants to blame their circumstances. The authors note that such statements run directly against the presumption of innocence and against criminology’s core mission of understanding why crimes are committed. In Morocco, public debate over Article 507 of the Penal Code, which prescribes life imprisonment for robbery involving a weapon, revealed how a broad statutory definition of a weapon, one that could in theory include a screwdriver, allows punishment to jump from a five-year maximum to life imprisonment, a severity that provoked a rare counter-movement by the mothers of convicted defendants. In India, the brutal 2012 gang rape and murder of a young woman known to the public as Nirbhaya generated massive protests and a government-appointed reform committee, yet the resulting 2013 criminal law amendments went further than the Verma Committee recommended, expanding the death penalty despite the committee’s explicit advice against it.

Across these cases, the authors identify a recurring architecture of claims. Populists insist the system is too lenient and demand severity. They place the victim and public safety at the center of debate, framed in zero-sum terms against legal safeguards. They reject criminological inquiry into the social determinants of crime as elitist indulgence. They position themselves as the authentic voice of ordinary people against out-of-touch experts. And they appeal to emotion rather than reason, mobilising outrage and fear as political capital. The murder of twelve-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993, framed as the loss of America’s innocent child, exemplifies how such emotional mobilisation can drive rapid legal change, producing California’s Three-Strikes law within months of the abduction.

The criminological case against these claims is stark. The most widely diffused populist assumption holds that harsher penalties deter crime because rational actors weigh potential gains against potential losses. Yet the empirical literature points the other way. Anthony Doob and Cheryl Webster’s examination of numerous studies found that most reviews do not support the claim that harsher sanctions deter, and the few studies that did were found to suffer from serious methodological or conceptual problems. Daniel Nagin’s assessment of deterrence research found that evidence for the certainty of punishment, particularly the probability of apprehension, is far more consistent than evidence for the severity of punishment. A meta-analysis by Travis Pratt and colleagues reached a similar conclusion, finding that the deterrent effects of formal legal sanctions are at best modest to negligible, and that punishment effects often shrink to zero when researchers control for factors such as self-control, peer influence, and antisocial attitudes. Strikingly, the most robust deterrents identified were informal sanctions such as shame and loss of respect, suggesting that fear of social costs outweighs fear of legal punishment.

Punitive sanctions do not merely fail to deter; they can actively undermine interventions that work. Mark Lipsey’s meta-analysis of 443 studies on juvenile delinquency treatment found that outcomes favoured treatment in 64.3 percent of studies, with the best programs reducing recidivism by ten to twenty percentage points. Some punitive interventions, notably deterrence-oriented programs such as shock incarceration and Scared Straight, produced negative effects, meaning that the tools promoted as making streets safer may be making them less safe. A review by Lipsey and Francis Cullen covering both juvenile and adult offending confirmed that supervision and sanctions show at best modest reductions in recidivism and sometimes increase reoffending, while rehabilitation treatments yield consistently positive and relatively large effects. Evidence-based frameworks such as the Risk-Need-Responsivity model, which tailors interventions to an offender’s risk level, criminogenic needs, and learning style, have been shown to reduce recidivism by an average of 17 percent in custodial settings and 35 percent in community settings when all three principles are properly implemented. Research on more than 55,000 prisoners released from Minnesota prisons between 2003 and 2011 found that warehousing inmates without programming increased the odds of recidivism by 13 percent, while participation in effective interventions lowered those odds by 12 to 26 percent.

The authors anticipate an obvious objection: even if punitiveness fails as crime control, punishment serves other purposes. Here they draw on David Garland’s sociology of punishment, which treats punishment as a complex social institution, like the family or the economy, whose meaning cannot be reduced to any single instrumental goal. Populists are entitled, the authors concede, to demand justice and just deserts. But retribution, properly understood, does not license punitiveness. Andrew von Hirsch’s principle of commensurate deserts calls for proportion between the seriousness of a crime and the severity of punishment, and raising penalties for particular offences disrupts the internal ranking of the sentencing scale while overstating an offender’s blameworthiness. As Douglas Husak argues, retribution understood as the infliction of deserved punishment producing intrinsic value can be compatible with a restrictive, even abolitionist, stance toward imprisonment. The populist move from desert to ever-greater severity thus fails on moral as well as empirical grounds.

The democratic claim fares no better. Penal populism presents itself as the voice of the people, but public opinion research suggests that the punitive consensus politicians invoke is largely manufactured. Pierre Bourdieu famously argued that public opinion does not exist in the form its purveyors claim. Julian Roberts and colleagues, drawing on data from five countries, found a wide disjuncture between superficial opinion polls and more sophisticated measures, concluding that support for punitive policies is far less solid than politicians suggest, even though crude polls carry more weight with policymakers. Katherine Beckett’s research showed that public concern about crime and drugs is strongly associated with prior political initiative on those issues, indicating that concern is often politically fabricated rather than spontaneously held. Moreover, when members of the public are given information about the consequences of punitive policies, their support for punitiveness tends to decline, and surveys consistently show public support for rehabilitation alongside other goals of punishment.

The authors are careful to acknowledge context. Criminology itself bears some responsibility for the populist backlash. Robert Martinson’s famous 1974 claim that nothing works in rehabilitation eroded public trust in expert-led penal policy, and although Martinson later retracted much of his conclusion, the damage contributed to what Garland calls the culture of control, in which states abandoned the rehabilitative ideal for risk management and punitive display. Garland has since asked whether criminologists are doing enough to communicate their knowledge credibly, warning that failing to do so leaves the way open for dangerous populist alternatives. The authors also note that a level of genuine public punitiveness exists and is substantial; their point is that opinions formed in the absence of crucial information about consequences are difficult to justify as a basis for policy.

The study’s central contribution is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. By integrating criminology, restrained retributivism, the sociology of punishment, and public opinion research, Bourekkadi and Elarraj demonstrate that penal populism invokes criminology, morality, and democracy selectively yet satisfies none of them. Its policies appeal to emotion while maintaining a veneer of legitimacy through claims of effectiveness and popular support that do not hold. The authors do not argue that punitive policies can never be defended, only that the usual justifications offered for them cannot survive scrutiny, and they hypothesise that reframing the debate around the genuine justification of punishment would drain much of the emotional appeal politicians exploit. Future research, they argue, should develop an alternative framework for penal policy, one grounded in evidence-based practice, proportionality, and democratic integrity, while addressing the structural conditions that allow populist penal policies to persist despite the fallacy of their claims.

Subject of Research: The justificatory failure of penal populism in contemporary criminal justice policy

Article Title: Penal Populism and the Failure of Its Core Claims

Article References: Penal Populism and the Failure of Its Core Claims. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00588-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00588-z

Keywords: penal populism, criminology, criminal justice, deterrence, rehabilitation, retribution, public opinion, punishment, evidence-based policy, populism, sentencing, sociology of punishment