Brendon McConnell

Crime and the Depenalization of Cannabis Possession: Evidence from a Policing Experiment

We evaluate the impact on crime of a localized policing experiment that depenalized the possession of small quantities of cannabis in the London borough of Lambeth. We find that depenalization policy caused the police to reallocate effort toward nondrug crime. Despite the overall fall in crime attributable to the policy, we find that the total welfare of local residents likely fell, as measured by house prices. We shed light on what would be the impacts on crime of a citywide depenalization policy by developing and calibrating a structural model of the market for cannabis and crime.

Racial and Ethnic Sentencing Differentials in the Federal Criminal Justice System

A large body of multidisciplinary research has documented how sentencing outcomes vary tremendously across racial and ethnic groups. The research challenge lies in establishing whether these sentencing differentials are driven by unobserved heterogeneity correlated to defendant race/ethnicity, or whether they reflect discrimination. We add to the debate by examining the robustness of racial/ethnic sentencing gaps, by gender, when allowing for selection on unobservables. We do so in the context of federal criminal cases, considering 250,000 cases, and using a dataset containing a rich set of covariates relating to defendant and legal characteristics of cases.