Research

Nearly 80 percent of arrests in the United States involve low-level misdemeanor offenses, yet even an arrest without conviction can alter the trajectory of a person’s life through the stigma of a criminal record and the resulting reduction in economic opportunity. Because misdemeanor system contact can create barriers to employment, housing, education, and other forms of mobility, policymakers have increasingly considered alternatives that reduce unnecessary entry into the criminal justice system. Adult pre-arrest diversion programs are one such intervention designed to divert low-risk individuals before they formally enter the system. Despite their growing use, there is little causal evidence on the effectiveness of adult pre-arrest diversion programs. This paper helps fill that gap by estimating the causal effect of adult pre-arrest diversion for misdemeanor offenses on subsequent criminal justice contact using individual-level administrative data from Florida’s 8th Judicial Circuit. In this setting, eligible non-traffic, non-domestic-violence misdemeanor cases in which law enforcement does not make an arrest may be referred to the State Attorney’s Office for diversion screening. I exploit the quasi-random assignment of defendants to police officers with different propensities to refer eligible cases to diversion. Using officer referral leniency as an instrument for diversion receipt, I estimate the causal effect of diversion on future arrests and convictions among low-level offenders. The results show that diversion reduces the probability of a future arrest by 22.3 percentage points and the probability of a future conviction by 18.8 percentage points within two years, relative to otherwise similar defendants who were not referred. These effects represent declines of 54 percent and 57 percent relative to the no-referral mean and extend to both felony and misdemeanor recidivism. Results are also consistent with a supplementary local timing-based analysis around program rollout. The findings suggest that, by providing an alternative to arrest and prosecution, adult pre-arrest diversion can substantially reduce future contact with the criminal justice system. By reducing later contact with the criminal justice system, these programs may help limit the long-term collateral consequences associated with misdemeanor system involvement. More broadly, the paper contributes new causal evidence to policy discussions about how to reduce the footprint of the criminal justice system while preserving public safety.

This paper studies the labor-market consequences of restricting employers’ use of pre-employment polygraph tests. The project is motivated by a broader research question: when policymakers delete a screening signal from the hiring process for protecting worker rights, do they reduce discrimination and improve allocation, or do they instead push employers toward noisier substitutes that can worsen outcomes for some groups? States adopted different restrictions before the federal Employee Polygraph Protection Act of 1988, and the federal statute itself created clear occupational exemptions. The analysis combines linked monthly CPS data from 1976–1988 with CPS ASEC data from 1977–1988. The linked monthly CPS allows me to study worker-level transitions into employment and into involuntary job loss, including recent-hire separations as a measure of post-hire match quality. The CPS ASEC extends the analysis to employment status, job search, income, poverty, and insurance coverage. Preliminary results suggest that polygraph bans did not mechanically improve worker outcomes.